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Adut Duor, 14 months old, sits on his mother's lap in the malnutrition ward of Bunj Hospital in Maban, South Sudan, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Caitlin Kelly)

JUBA – At 14 months, Adut Duor should be walking. Instead, his spine juts through his skin and his legs dangle like sticks from his mother’s lap in a South Sudan hospital. At half the size of a healthy baby his age, he is unable to walk.

Adut’s mother, Ayan, couldn’t breastfeed her fifth child, a struggle shared by the 1.1 million pregnant and lactating women who are malnourished in the east African country.

“If I had a blessed life and money to feed him, he would get better,” Ayan said at a state hospital in Bor, 200 kilometers (124 miles) from the capital,

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