The Challenge of undernutrition
Undernutrition is a major challenge to human and economic development.
It is estimated that almost one billion people globally face hunger and are unable to get enough food while another one billion people do not get enough vitamins and minerals.
Children under five years of age are worst affected, with around 195 million being chronically malnourished because of long term exposure to a poor diet and repeated infections. More than 1 in 10 children are acutely malnourished and one third of all child deaths are linked to undernutrition.
The children that do survive hunger and undernutrition have stunted growth and compromised brain development. This has a major impact on future wealth and status, with studies showing the links between stunting, not completing school and low wages.
Many children are born undernourished because their mothers are at the time of conception and throughout the pregnancy. This helps to explain why poor nutrition is passed between generations.
Approaches to nutrition
By the age of two, the damage done by poor nutrition is mostly irreversible. This is why the UK aid is focusing on the first “1,000 days”, from conception to a child’s second birthday – ensuring that mother and child get the right food and vitamins they need for a healthy and active life.
The UK Government is doing this by building partnerships in country, internationally, and with the private sector to increase global efforts to tackle undernutrition in the critical ‘1,000 day window’.
For example, the UK is supporting the new global movement, ‘Scaling Up Nutrition’ (SUN). SUN is giving political momentum and coordinated international support for nutrition action across many countries with high levels of undernutrition. This programme is also providing aid to international organisations and partner governments to develop nutrition programmes and invest in research.
On the ground, DFID is working with governments and civil society to get nutrition services to pregnant women and children under five years of age.
In Nigeria, for example, a new programme will reach 6.2 million children with micronutrient supplementation, routine healthcare services and child health weeks. UK aid will also help to build up communities’ capacity to identify and manage cases of acute malnutrition at an early stage.
In India we will focus our support in three of the poorest Indian states which, together, are home to 13 million stunted children. Resources will be invested in health, nutrition and water and sanitation services to ensure that undernourished children and their families get all the services they need to make them grow well and be healthy.
As part of the UK’s efforts to help build an effective global response to tackle undernutrition, the Department for International Development is supporting the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to develop a short distance-learning course called ‘Programming for Nutrition Outcomes’.
The course contains four core sessions covering the scale of global nutrition concerns, the causes and consequences of undernutrition, the assessment of nutritional status and the international landscape for nutrition programming.
The full course will be launched in Autumn 2012 and will be free to download for study from the LSHTM website as an Open Educational Resource. The first four core sessions are now available and free to download. Please note that these are self-study sessions and that no tutorial support is provided. Further information is available here.
Our new strategy, “Scaling Up Nutrition: The UK’s position paper on undernutrition” , sets out how we will scale up our nutrition programmes to reach 20 million children under the age of five, through our support to nutrition-related programmes, in addition to our humanitarian aid, over the next four years.
We will do this through:
- Reaching more adolescent girls and pregnant women and children under the age of five years with nutrition specific interventions
- Delivering greater impact through programmes across multiple sectors (“nutrition-sensitive development”)
- Building a more effective international response