A Promising Future for Child Nutrition?

This ProgBlog article by Robbie Lawrence, Wikichild Coordinator, is part of the Wikiprogress Health Series.

"In June, the Prime Minister will host the Nutrition and Growth event ahead of the G8; we hope Mr Cameron takes this timely opportunity to pledge significant investment in nutrition programmes and show real leadership in improving children’s futures, as well as those of their communities and their countries.” David Bull, UNICEF UK

Wikichild is currently focusing on nutrition as part of the wider Wikiprogress spotlight on health this month. On Monday, UNICEF released ‘Improving Child Nutrition: The achievable imperative for global progress’ which reports that significant advances have been made in the fight against stunting – the long term effect of hunger and malnutrition. Citing successes in eleven countries - Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Nepal, Peru, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sri Lanka, Kyrgyzstan, Tanzania and Vietnam, the report shows that stunting and other forms of undernutrition can be brought down by improved understanding of the problem and the implementation of practical measures that target pregnant mothers and children in the first two years of their life.

According to UNICEF, one in four of all children suffer from stunting because they haven’t had the right nutrients in the critical 1,000-day window following conception. Malnutrition, through lack of both macronutrients and certain micronutrients has long-term negative impacts on brain and nerve development and function, including mental activity, and the acquisition of skills needed to interact well socially. This impairment is often reflected in lower IQs and poorer performance at school (Save the Children). The damage done to a child’s body and brain by stunting is irreversible. It brings down performance at school and later at work, and heightens children’s risk of dying from infectious diseases.

‘Improving Child Nutrition’ builds on UNICEF’s earlier report ‘Tracking Progress on Child and Material’ by highlighting new developments and showing that attempts to improve nutrition programs are working. An estimated 80 per cent of the world’s stunted children live in just 14 countries spanning across Africa and Asia, and by working in communities within these nations, UNICEF and other organizations have reduced stunting by applying a series of steps including, improving women’s diet, early and exclusive breastfeeding and providing minerals and appropriate food to new mothers.

These programs all have common elements: political commitment, national policies and the presence of trained community workers to deliver information and aid. To use two examples of their success; we can look at Ethiopia, where stunting has been cut from 57 percent to 44 percent in the first decade of this century through the implementation of a national nutrition program, and at the Maharashtra state in India where the percentage of stunted children fell from 39 percent in 2005 to 23 percent in 2012 due to the support of frontline workers. 

Such progress is undoubtedly promising, and presents a unique opportunity for future global frameworks to further alleviate the problem of undernutrition. UNICEF itself acknowledges that there is still a great amount of work to be done if the World Health Assembly’s new global target of reducing the number of stunted children under the age of five by forty percent by 2025 is to be achieved. 

More recently, inequality has been a hot topic on the Wikichild, Wikiprogress and Wikigender platforms so we are well versed in the hidden realties that large, all encompassing goals such as this can mask, but it is encouraging that new approaches are targeting individual countries and communities, allowing accurate data systems to be developed that can describe and monitor changes in the circumstances of different population groups.

Furthermore, tools like the Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index (released last week) provide greater transparency and public accountability by measuring what governments achieve, and where they fail, in addressing hunger and undernutrition. Even Duncan Green has commended the HANCI, stating that ‘it could become one of the more useful annual league tables’, as it forces governments to be ‘slapped’ if they underperform. 

Nutrition should remain at the center of the global development agenda leading up to Post 2015. The evidence laid out in UNICEF’s report and the momentum generated by their successes shows that improving child and maternal nutrition is an achievable necessity for global progress.

Robbie Lawrence

Wikichild Coordinator

Can the number of vegetables you eat define your mental well-being and progress?

Flicking through different UK papers and websites, you would be forgiven for not knowing that the 4^th OECD World Forum on Measuring Wellbeing for Policy Making and Development had taken place in New Delhi in October.    What’s more, nobody heard a word in the press about David Cameron’s address to the event – albeit by video link.  The mainstream press has had its hands full of other dreadful stories, which you could say show a distinct lack of progress and wellbeing in our society.

Conventional indicators of economic performance* and equality* in Wales point towards increasingly disadvantaged communities in this country. Professor Sir Michael Marmot might say that such inequalities give a good indication as to the lack of fairness in Welsh society*.  Which begs the obvious question, how can we make our communities fairer?  And how do we know when we’ve got there?

                                                                                                                       

This is a point made by Nobel Prize winning economist and conference speaker in New Delhi, Professor Joseph Stiglitz. 

“What we measure effects what we do.  If we measure the wrong thing, we do the wrong thing.  GDP measures the busy-ness of our economy.  But the big question is whether we are busy doing the right things.  Our preoccupation with GDP makes it difficult for politicians to back policies that are good for society and for the environment but which might not result in an increase in GDP.”

So how about a couple of alternatives? The University College of London’s English Longitudinal Study of Ageing has suggested that future disability and poor health could be predicted by the state of a person's mind.  Professor Andrew Steptoe points to the “protective effect of enjoyment,” with nearly three times more people dying in the lower enjoyment group than compared to the greater enjoyment group.  Imagine public services whose performance was measured using indicators of user enjoyment.

Another alternative might come from a Warwick University study that found mental wellbeing appeared to rise with the number of daily portions of fruit and vegetables consumed.  Seven a day was the magic number. 

What about a national indicator of organic, locally sourced vegetables consumed per person as a key measure of societal progress.  Its not a bad idea.  It implies a local economy, that’s sympathetic with the environment, meets the needs of the community and has the added bonus of being healthy.   It also has a certain wider, public appeal if you have ambitions of wanting to do things differently.  I wonder if it’ll catch on?

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* Welsh GDP is just under 80% of the EU average and is lower than any other part of the UK with 9.1% of the population being unemployed (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-17656891).

* Public Health Wales Observatory, Measuring inequalities: trends in mortality and life expectancy in Wales, 2011 shows an increase in the inequality gap in life expectancy, healthy life expectancy and quality of life in Wales.

Wellbeing Wales