Nutrition in a child's first 1,000 days, from pregnancy to the second birthday, should become a core measure of development progress, argues Demeke Mekonnen, Ethiopia's former deputy prime minister and foreign minister, in a column for SciDev.Net written after a week of development debates at the UN General Assembly. The views are the writer's own.
He opens with a contradiction: buying infant formula adds to gross domestic product, while breastfeeding, one of the most valuable investments a society can make in healthy children, does not. In his view this shows that the world measures human development backwards, looking at what adults achieve rather than at the conditions that made those achievements possible.
Mekonnen points to evidence that early nutrition shapes later life. In Guatemala, children given a high-protein supplement before the age of three earned 46 per cent higher wages as adults than those who were not. Research in Zimbabwe found that children stunted by malnutrition completed fewer years of school and earned roughly ten per cent less over their lifetimes. Women who were undernourished as girls are also more likely to have children whose growth is restricted, so the damage carries into the next generation.
His target is the Human Development Index, which the UN Development Programme builds from income, education and life expectancy. Those indicators describe adult outcomes, he writes, and say nothing about the nutrition children received early on. He stresses that he is not asking for another ranking, but for early nutrition to be given a meaningful place within the existing index.
That would not need an expensive new system, he argues, because much of the data already exists in national demographic and health surveys. A small group of countries with strong nutrition data could pilot the approach through the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, testing questions of data, comparability and method before any wider rollout.
With official development aid shrinking, Mekonnen warns against treating nutrition as one sector competing with schools, clinics and roads for money. A well-funded school system will underperform, he writes, if children arrive with their development already held back by malnutrition. Mekonnen founded and chairs the YADAM Foundation, a non-profit that works on malnutrition.
Photo: USAID Ethiopia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Source: SciDev.Net
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