The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has urged governments to stamp out childhood malnutrition, saying a series of relatively cheap interventions could ensure children reach their full potential and spur economic growth.
The issue is directly relevant to SA, which despite being a middle-income country has a high rate of child malnutrition and stunting. More than a quarter (27%) of children under the age of five are stunted, according to the 2016 SA Demographic and Health Survey.
Malnutrition was the “world’s worst child health crisis” and climate change was only making it worse, said the foundation’s co-chair Bill Gates as the organisation released its eighth annual Goalkeepers report on Tuesday.
Climate change poses additional threats to food production in large parts of the world, and without immediate action an extra 40-million children are at risk of stunting and 28-million are at risk of wasting between 2040 and 2050, the report reads.
Children who are stunted are short for their age and may suffer irreversible damage to their cognitive development, while children who are wasted are weak, emaciated and at risk of developmental delays and death.
About 148-million children were stunted and 45-million were wasted in 2023, according to the World Health Organisation.
“If (children) grow up healthy, with a fully healthy body and brain, they are the workforce of the future. That is the most critical investment in human capital that any government can be making,” the foundation’s CEO, Mark Suzman, said.
“If you don’t make that investment, the ... cost [to] society is huge,” he said in a media briefing ahead of the report’s launch.
The report highlights a range of simple, cheap and proven interventions for improving childhood nutrition, such as food fortification and the provision of vitamin supplements to pregnant women.
For example, fortifying salt with iodine and folic acid in Ethiopia could reduce anaemia by 4% and cut neural tube defects by 75%, while providing pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries with micronutrient supplements could save almost half-a-million lives and improve birth outcomes for 25-million babies by 2040. Prenatal supplements could cost as little as $2.60 for an entire pregnancy, it said.
The share of foreign aid directed to Africa had decreased since 2010, leaving hundreds of millions of children at risk from preventable diseases and threatening to unravel the health gains made between 2000 and 2020, the foundation said.
In 2010, 40% of foreign aid went to African countries, but the figure is now down 25% though more than half of all child deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa, it said.
“Today, the world is contending with more challenges than at any point in my adult life: inflation, debt, new wars. Unfortunately, aid isn’t keeping pace with these needs, particularly in the places that need it the most,” Gates said. “I think we can give global health a second act — even in a world where competing challenges require governments to stretch their budgets,” he said.
Gates urged donors to maintain global health funding and tackle the growing threat of child malnutrition by supporting the Child Nutrition Fund, a new financing mechanism led by Unicef that aims to accelerate initiatives to end stunting and wasting.
He also called on governments to fully fund established institutions that have already saved millions of lives, including the vaccine alliance Gavi and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
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