By GHHub
Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the world’s highest rates of chronic malnutrition among children. Now, the United Nations children’s agency has put a price tag on it: $25 billion a year. That’s the conclusion of a UNICEF conference on child malnutrition that wrapped up Wednesday in Paris. via UNICEF: Africa’s Child Malnutrition Costs $25 Billion [...]
By Tom Murphy
Journalist Roger Thurow presents at the recent TEDxChange out in Seattle. He describes the moment when he realized the importance of the issue of hunger. He goes on to discuss ways that hunger is being addressed. You can listen to Tom Paulson chat with Roger after the event here.
By Eldis Jobs
Organization: International Medical Corps Closing date: 14 Jun 2013 International Medical Corps is a global, humanitarian, nonprofit organization dedicated to saving lives and relieving suffering through health care training and relief and development programs. Established in 1984 by volunteer doctors and nurses, International Medical Corps is a private, voluntary, nonpolitical, nonsectarian organization. Its mission is to improve the quality of life through health interventions and related activities that build local capacity in underserved communities worldwide. By offering training and health care to local populations and medical assistance to people at highest risk, and with the flexibility to respond rapidly to emergency situations, International Medical Corps rehabilitates devastated health care systems and helps bring them back to self-reliance. PROGRAM SUMMARY: The influx of refugees into southern Turkey due to conflict in Syria has increased drastically since mid-2012.
“Despite early indications the Sahel would not suffer pangs of hunger this year, experts now worry that food insecurity could be worse than in 2012 — the year of the West Africa food crisis,” Thomson Reuters Foundation reports. “Ten million people in the Sahel remain food insecure, and 4.5 million children under-five are at risk of acute malnutrition,” the news service notes, adding, “Floods in northern Nigeria as well as conflict throughout the region are thought to be the main causes for increasing food insecurity throughout the Sahel.” In addition, “[t]he conflict in Mali has also caused strains, with supply routes closing and Arab traders who supplied markets in the country’s north fleeing,” the news service writes (Hussain, 4/26). “On Thursday four international agencies warned that northern Mali will descend to emergency levels of food insecurity in less than two months if conditions do not improve,” The Guardian reports. “[T]he war — which since January has led to the intervention of French and African military forces — has created long-term instability and huge displacement in northern Mali,” the newspaper notes, adding, “The U.N. says 282,548 people are now registered displaced in Mali, and almost 50,000 refugees are in Burkina Faso and Niger, and 74,000 in Mauritania.” According to the newspaper, “[m]any organizations working on food distribution in northern Mali say they are facing a funding shortfall” (Hirsch, 4/29).
By GHHub
During a child’s first 1,000 days of life, critical cognitive and physical developments occur that play a major role in determining his or her future success. For millions of children, preventable threats like undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies can cloud the future.Thirty-six countries carry 90% of this burden. Find out more… Infographic-Micronutrients-for-All – Infographic-Micronutrients-for-All_1.pdf.
“The humanitarian response to the 2012 food crisis in Africa’s Sahel region was bigger and better than in previous emergencies, but millions of people still did not receive the assistance they needed and many remain vulnerable to hunger, Oxfam said in a report on Tuesday,” AlertNet reports. “The report said that more than five million people received food aid from the World Food Programme alone in 2012, and more children were treated for malnutrition than ever before,” the news service writes, adding the early report system worked, some donors quickly released funding, and aid agencies responded fast, according to the report. However, the food crisis still affects about 18 million people across nine countries, and “[s]ome 10 million people in the Sahel still urgently need help to feed their families and rebuild their livelihoods, the report said,” AlertNet states, noting “a $1.7 billion 2013 U.N. appeal for the region is only a quarter covered.”
“UNICEF’s latest report [.pdf] on child nutrition, launched at the Dublin Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, Climate Justice hosted by the Mary Robinson Foundation and Irish Government, revealed that every year 2.3 million children under the age of five still die of malnutrition and 165 million children are stunted as a result of not receiving enough nutritious food within the first 1,000 days of life,” British Member of Parliament Ivan Lewis, the shadow secretary of state for international development, writes in a Huffington Post U.K. “Politics” opinion piece. He adds the report “demonstrates the vital link between development and the importance of the first 1,000 days of a child’s life,” and continues, “Addressing stunting can break the cycle of poverty and have significant social and economic impacts on the development of nations. However, at the moment the scale of stunting means that more than one quarter of the world’s children cannot reach their full potential.”
“Nearly 2.5 years after it began, Haiti’s cholera epidemic is getting worse, not better, and efforts to treat the sick are desperately short of funds, say aid groups on the ground,” The Lancet reports. “Since the first reported cases in October 2010, cholera has killed 8,000 people and sickened some 649,000 more, wreaking havoc in a country bereft of effective water and sanitation systems and among a population with no natural immunity to the disease,” the journal notes, adding the oncoming rainy season has “some fear[ing] a surge in new cases could overwhelm Haiti’s ill-equipped cholera treatment centers, many of which have struggled to retain staff and replenish supplies in the face of donor fatigue and errors of perception about the state of the epidemic.” The article describes a large deficit of funding to fight cholera, widespread malnutrition in the country, and a lack of access to water and sanitation services. The Lancet includes comments from Louise Ivers of Partners In Health and Jon Andrus of the Pan-American Health Organization (Adams, 4/13).
April 3, 2013 The World Bank unveiled its new targets which included the bold goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030. Guardian reports: The bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, claimed signs of recovery in the global economy meant there was now an “opportunity to create a world free from the stain of poverty” by 2030. “We are at an auspicious moment in history, when the successes of past decades and an increasingly favourable economic outlook combine to give developing countries a chance – for the first time ever – to end extreme poverty within a generation,” he said in a speech in Washington. The World Bank’s upbeat projections, defining extreme poverty as the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day, come as governments and international institutions prepare to set new targets to update the 15-year Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2000. Faster-than-expected growth in China and some developing economies has helped the UN meet parts of its existing target for halving poverty ahead of time, but the approaching deadline for setting new priorities has sparked a fierce debate in the development community.
“A growing number of people in Haiti do not have enough to eat, according to the United Nations relief wing, mostly as a result of drought and the impact of recent tropical storms,” the U.N. News Centre reports (4/3). The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs “said in its monthly bulletin that a spike in malnutrition has been recorded in some areas since October,” the Associated Press/Washington Post writes, adding, “At least one in five households faces a serious food deficit and acute malnutrition despite efforts to reduce hunger, the study said.” According to the AP, “Widespread flooding damaged crops in the country’s south when Hurricane Sandy and Tropical Storm Isaac brushed Haiti last year” (4/2).
April 5, 2013 The World Food Programme finally delivered food aid to people affected by the ongoing fighting in Sudan’s Blue Nile State. From AFP: “This is the first time that the agency has distributed food assistance since the conflict broke out in September 2011,” the WFP said. The war in Blue Nile and another state, South Kordofan, has occurred largely out of world view as Sudan, citing security concerns, tightly constrained the movement of foreign aid workers, diplomats and reporters seeking to visit the region. “While we continue to strive for access to all areas, this is still a major breakthrough which will enable us to assist those who continue to be displaced by the conflict or those who have decided to return to their homes and are in dire need of food assistance,” WFP Sudan director Adnan Khan said in a statement. In South Kordofan, authorities had already allowed WFP to distribute food in a limited area, but rebel zones in both states remain off limits
Andrew Seal and Rob Bailey discuss the limitations of data-driven humanitarian efforts, and the lessons learned from the 2011 Somalia famine. In May 2012, the UN Secretary General published a report on ‘Strengthening of the coordination of emergency humanitarian assistance of the United Nations.’ The report identified the need to ‘…build systems to support data-driven humanitarian decision making,’ noting that ‘…the current humanitarian system often struggles to furnish timely and consistently reliable information and analysis in order to provide an appropriate response.’ Perhaps there was a certain irony that the UN report was published just 3 months after the end of the famine in Southern Somalia. One year on from its officially declared end, we reflect on what has been learnt from the various evaluations of the response to the famine, and what that says about the limits to data-driven humanitarian decision making. The 2011 famine in Somalia was the most recent to afflict humankind and one of the best documented. It affected extensive parts of Southern Somalia and is thought to have cost the lives of tens of thousands of people, while hundreds of thousands more fled across the border into Kenya and Ethiopia.
Continuing on the ‘new development threats’ theme of yesterday’s post on Big Tobacco, the latest issue of the World Bank’s Food Price Watch looks at the links between increasing food price volatility and obesity. A blog post by the Bank’s José Cuesta starts with a nice counter-intuitive quiz (below). The correct answers, by the way are
“The United Nations said Tuesday that it had been forced to delay desperately needed food aid to nearly 300,000 people in Guinea Bissau since it so far had received no donations to support the operation,” Agence France-Presse reports. “‘The assistance was due to start on March 1, 2013, but operations are stalled because, so far, (we have) not received any donor support for the operation,’ Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the U.N.’s World Food Programme [WFP], told reporters in Geneva,” the news service writes, adding, “The WFP was urgently seeking $7.1 million to provide food and nutrition aid to 278,000 people across the troubled west African nation this year, ‘including to young mothers and children at increased risk of malnutrition,’ she said.” AFP notes, “The country is considered one of the world’s poorest, with a full 69 percent of the 1.6 million inhabitants living on less than two dollars a day, and 33 percent living on less than one dollar, Byrs said.” The news agency adds, “Byrs said a full six percent of the country’s population was suffering from acute malnutrition, with the rate rising to eight percent in some regions” (3/26).
