What we are doing
A Life Free From Hunger
by Jasmine Whitbread, CEO, Save the Children
By the age of 30 months, children in Niger are already 8cm shorter on average than children in Western countries like the UK due to malnutrition. On average, a child who was chronically malnourished will earn 20% less than a child who had a nutritious diet. As you can see, this phenomenon is leaving millions of lives permanently blighted in its wake.
Imagine you were a parent who couldn’t give your children the kinds of food that will help them grow and thrive. As a mother myself, I find it heartbreaking to consistently come across children the in poor countries who are growing up surviving on one staple food, like rice or maize; a diet that doesn’t give them the right nutrients, minerals or vitamins to develop as they should.
In recent years the world has made dramatic progress in reducing child deaths, down from 12 to 7.6 million, but this momentum will stall if we fail to tackle malnutrition.
Every hour of every day, 300 children die because of malnutrition, often simply because they don’t have access to the basic, nutritious foods that we take for granted in rich countries. Malnutrition and disease work in a deadly cycle where a child who hasn’t had access to a nutritious diet is more likely to suffer from disease, and the more they suffer from a disease, they more they can suffer loss of appetite and become malnourished. We know how to stop this. It must be stopped.
Save the Children had huge successes last year focusing on key elements that we knew could help stop the crisis of child mortality. Our global EVERY ONE campaign to prevent children dying before their fifth birthday campaigned with fervor and success to generate more funds from world leaders for vaccinations and healthworkers.
This year, we are focusing on nutrition and children getting not just enough, but the right food to eat. Malnutrition is the underlying cause of a third of all child deaths. But we also know that, even for those children who survive, long term malnutrition causes devastating and irreversible damage. This type of malnutrition is called ‘stunting’, or chronic malnutrition, and its impact is devastating.
I’m in India for the launch of our campaign today, the country with more malnourished children in it than any other – a staggering 100million – where food prices have soared 17%, and half of children are stunted. I am handing in our charity’s new report ‘A Life Free from Hunger’ to the chief minister in Delhi and visiting our work in the slums to meet mothers who struggle every day with the reality of this crisis.
India, like others shouldering heavy burdens of malnutrition, such as Afghanistan, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, urgently need some strong political action to address the crisis. The world might be focusing on the financial crisis, but Save the Children’s report shows that, unless world leaders act now to tackle malnutrition, it will blight the lives of nearly half a billion children over the next 15 years – a crisis that could cost the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars.
The good news is that we already know what works and with a global plan we could save more than 2 million children’s lives every year. We need protection for families and small scale farmers who are already living with nothing and for whom rising food prices tips them over the edge. We need world leaders to take advantage of the G8 and G20 this year to agree a target to reduce malnutrition and put a plan in place to deliver on it. And we need the key interventions that can save lives now to be funded, such as support for breastfeeding and the fortification of basic foods.
This crisis is hidden but we want to break it out into the open and make governments and world leaders face up to it and the children’s lives it is affecting. Join us on twitter today following #hiddencrisis, where we’re having a 12 hour tweetchat about the reality of this problem and hoping to rally support behind our absolutely vital calls for change.
