How we tackle hunger

Jihad from Bangladesh is only ten weeks old, but he has already had surgery to stop him vomiting because he was so malnourished. Now he is slowly improving. Nearly half of all children under five in Bangladesh are under-weight or small for the age as a result of malnutrition.

Our tools for measuring hunger

The most effective strategies to prevent child malnutrition are those that are based on a good understanding of the causes of the problem. Our Cost of the Diet method is a unique approach that helps calculate the minimum amount of money a family will have to spend to meet their energy, protein, fat and micronutrient requirements using locally available foods. Our Cost of the Diet work has been important in raising awareness internationally on the extent to which poverty limits progress in reducing malnutrition among children.

Our Household Economic Approach was also developed to help predict food shortages through the collection and analysis of information on how rural households live and make ends meet.

Our solution: eight-step plan for tackling hunger

Our recent report, Hungry for Change, shows that eight interventions are essential for improving the diets of pregnant women and young children. The interventions are:

• Promoting and supporting breastfeeding
• Supplementing micronutrients and carrying out deworming
• Increasing the availability and reducing the cost of nutritious food
• Cash transfers. Providing cash payments, like pensions or benefits, allow poor families to buy nutritious foods and build up their assets, such as livestock.
• Investing in nutrition-friendly agriculture and livestock policies
• Providing fortified foods required for children to grow up strong and healthy
• Educational work on nutrition, hygiene and food preparation practices
• Creating information systems that provide the basis for long-term planning and for rapid response during an emergency
• Managing the treatment of severe acute malnutrition better.

Our eight-step plan reflects the need for a comprehensive and integrated response to under-nutrition combining immediate and long-term interventions. It also presents the cost of ensuring that these interventions reach children at the critical period of their lives, and highlights the key role of donors, the UN, developing country governments and civil society need to play in order to ensure that Millennium Development Goal 1 is achieved.

Our advocacy success

Our Hungry for Change report showed that there’s no excuse for inaction. It would cost $8.8 billion a year for a package of measures to prevent malnutrition among mothers and young children in eight countries that are home to half the world’s malnourished children. This is less than half of what the world spends on bottled water in a year.

That’s why advocacy achievements on nutrition in 2009 were so critical.

• We helped convince the UK Department for International Development to develop a nutrition strategy to ensure that the aid it gives will improve the nutrition of 12 million children over the next five years – one in ten of all undernourished children in the world.
• The European Commission, the largest food-aid provider in the world, also revised its food-assistance strategy to put mothers’ and children’s nutrition first.
• With a handful of other aid agencies, we influenced the reform of the Committee on World Food Security to help ensure that the nutrition of the world’s poorest women and children is considered just as important as investing in growing more food.

“Paying for proper nutrition isn’t a band aid,” says Alex Rees, our Head of Hunger Reduction Policy. “It’s an investment in people so they can increase development in their own countries. It’s something we would want for our own children. If you don’t have the right to adequate food and nutrition, you don’t have anything else.”

 

Watch DFID's video about undernutrition and where to go from here: