A roadmap for ending childhood malnutrition
After decades of inadequate action, countries around the world, major international agencies, and advocacy organizations are finally turning their attention to a shameful and persistent global scourge: malnutrition in children and in women of childbearing age.
A report by Results for Development and the World Bank, released yesterday at a major event in Washington headlined by Bill Gates, gives for the first time a detailed “price tag” for a major effort over the coming decade to cut the rates of malnutrition and shows how heavily affected country governments, international agencies and others can work together to pay for such an effort.
How much will it cost and who will pay?
A global push to end childhood malnutrition is eminently affordable. For an average of $7 billion a year in extra funding—less than a third of the $20 billion in subsidies paid by the US Government to American farmers in 2014—the number of chronically malnourished children in the world could be reduced by 65 million, 265 million women could be cured of anemia and 3.8 million kids could be saved from malnutrition-related deaths between now and 2025.
This is one of the best investments leaders around the world can make, and one that they can afford.
The 10-year $70 billion (USD) price tag should be shared among the more than 100 countries that would benefit from the huge gains in better child nutrition and improved health, such as India, Ethiopia, and Peru and the many donor organizations from countries like Canada, the UK, the US, and Germany that have publicly committed themselves to doing more to combat malnutrition.
In our proposed financing scenario, donors would cover just over a third of the additional costs of stopping malnutrition over the next 10 years—an average of $2.6 billion annually. This would increase the share of development aid for nutrition by just two percentage points. The low- and middle-income country governments of Africa, Asia, and Latin America implementing the nutrition improvements would allocate an extra $4 billion a year, on average an extra 1.5 percent of their government health budgets.
A moral obligation
While malnutrition in its various forms—stunted children who are short for their age, wasted kids who are terribly thin as a result of acute malnutrition, anemic women and children whose lack sufficient iron in their blood—has been declining in recent years, progress is much too slow considering the immense human toll.
Malnutrition weakens children’s immune systems, making them susceptible to a range of illnesses. As a result, malnutrition contributes to around half of the 6 million child deaths that occur every year. It also damages children’s cognitive development, leading to poor school attendance and lower educational achievement, spawning generations of children who will be less productive as adults.
Prioritizing what works
To battle malnutrition, researchers have recently accumulated strong evidence on the actions that are most effective in combatting malnutrition, including better infant and infant feeding practices such as exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of a baby’s life, supplements of micronutrients such as vitamin A and iodine, and community-based therapeutic feeding for severely malnourished children. These actions must also be reinforced by advances in clean water and sanitation, women’s education, and other broader social policies.
We must apply this knowledge of what works and partner with countries with high malnutrition rates to build programs on a much larger scale against stunting, wasting, anemia and low rates of exclusive breastfeeding.
If we do this, we can achieve the global nutrition targets for 2025 that were adopted by all countries at the World Health Assembly: reducing the number of stunted children under five by 40 percent, lowering the prevalence of wasting to less than 5 percent of children, cutting rates of anemia by half, and ensuring that at least 50 percent of women exclusively breastfeed their babies in the first six months.
The time has come for us to step up together, in an act of global solidarity, to launch a campaign against malnutrition. Current spending to fight malnutrition amounts to less than $4 billion a year, compared to the $18 billion a year from affected countries and international agencies to combat AIDS in Africa and Asia, or the hundreds of billions that support fuel and energy subsidies in developing countries.
In a few months, leaders from around the world will gather to make political commitment to fighting malnutrition. Hopefully many will match their rhetoric with major financial pledges to cover the next 5-10 years. Armed with improved information about what works, new data on the overall costs, and a solid financing plan, we urge them to rise to the challenge of ending child malnutrition over the coming decade.
