In the News: Last week, someone asked Bill Gates what he would do, right now, if he had a magic wand and could solve one global health problem. Gates’ response wasn’t polio or even malaria, two infectious diseases that he and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation want to end within his lifetime. Instead, Gates said he’d cure child malnutrition, a stubbornly massive problem with few “easy” solutions. The World Health Assembly, a major annual meeting where global health policy and agendas are shaped, starts today (May 18). One of the first agenda items calls for updates on nutrition.
What’s the problem? Malnutrition often stems from more deeply-rooted structural challenges, inequalities, and sociopolitical conflicts that can’t be easily fixed by improving supply chain bottlenecks or funding ground-breaking medical research. After all, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever be able to vaccinate children against having too little food. Between 1990 and 2013, the number of children who died from protein-energy malnutrition (nearly 226,000) decreased by 36%. While this improvement is notable, the global rate of decline has slowed since 2005 and a number of countries lost more children to malnutrition in 2013 than in 1990.
Where is progress taking place? A number of countries have recorded tremendous progress against child malnutrition – and many of them once experienced some of the world’s highest death tolls from malnutrition. In a 2010 report called Undernutrition: What Works? A review of policy and practice, Bangladesh, Mozambique, Brazil, and Peru were highlighted as success stories in addressing nutrition challenges. While we don’t know what precisely caused what, here we consider some of the efforts that likely played a role in gains against malnutrition in Bangladesh and Mozambique.
Bangladesh: 88% reduction.
- Nationally supported agricultural programs and policies are viewed as main components to the country’s progress. For instance, Bangladesh instituted a new agricultural extension policy (1995-2010) to help bolster food production among small farmers and strengthen sustainable farming practices. Floating gardens, which do not require soil and are supported by a governmental program, have also helped to protect food production from the country’s extreme weather patterns.
Mozambique: 76% reduction.
- Aiming to address poverty and coordinating national policies related to nutrition are considered primary drivers of Mozambique’s gains. Since the 1990s, Mozambique has explicitly prioritized poverty reduction in its public policies. Continued updates to the country’s National Action Plan for the Reduction of Absolute Poverty link nutrition security initiatives with programs related to agriculture and public health. And Mozambique’s 2010 Right to Adequate Food bill, which has been supported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, was considered one of the world’s “most innovative and progressive” legislative efforts to improve food and nutrition access. No one-size-fits-all solution will work to tackle malnutrition, but it’s possible that success stories, like these from Bangladesh and Mozambique, will help inform the strategies needed to end its burden.
