Save the Children launches new report on how malnutrition affects education

Today, Save the Children launches a new report, Food for Thought: Tackling Child Malnutrition to unlock potential and boost prosperity. We are launching this ahead of the major Nutrition for Growth summit, which will be hosted by the United Kingdom and Brazilian Governments in London on June 8, 2013.

Far too often policy thinkers get stuck in their own silos. We fail to lift our heads up and think about the critical links between different issues. In Food for Thought we have brought together our expertise on education and nutrition and thoroughly explored the links.  The paper presents compelling evidence of the importance of nutrition if children are to achieve and thrive at school.

The learning crisis requires an education response

The scale of the learning crisis is well documented: a staggering 130 million children make it into school but then fail to learn even the basics. They are left without the key skills and abilities that they need to fulfil their potential and to lead fulfilling, productive lives. More importantly, it is the poorest and most marginalised who are often hit hardest.

It is a statement of the obvious that a big part of the response to such a challenge is to improve the quality of schools.  And there is growing recognition that quality for the poorest matters most – just last week an EU conference on education focused heavily on questions of equity and inequality. The education community has also long known the benefits of Early Childhood Care and Development programmes for education outcomes as children grow up.

Nutrition, stunting and learning  

But in addition to these pre-school and educational interventions, ensuring that children get the best start to life in the very early years is essential for boosting children’s chances of doing well at school. Our new report sets out just how much this matters:

• New analysis carried out by Oxford University for Save the Children (using the Young Lives survey) finds that children who are malnourished during childhood are nearly 20% less likely to be able to read a simple sentence by age 8, and are more likely to have fallen behind at school.
• They then go on to earn as much as 20% less as adults than their better-nourished counterparts.
• Save the Children also estimates that at a global level, today’s malnutrition levels could cost the global economy up to $125bn each year when today’s children grow up.

In short if the world fails to come together to tackle hunger (as the IF campaign is currently calling for in the UK) not only will this mean the continued scandal of unnecessary child deaths: it also reduces the chances of individuals gaining the skills to prosper and countries the opportunity to stand on their own two feet.

Too little donor funding allocated to nutrition  

Based on this evidence Food for Thought sets out the importance of integrating nutrition and stimulation activities into pre-school programs and policies. There is international consensus around the need for such integrated interventions, which form the basis of recommendations by the World Health Organization on the treatment of malnutrition. Save the Children has been successfully delivering integrated programming. In Bangladesh, our Early Childhood Care and Development programme delivered dietary advice as well as stimulation activities, and has seen a 40% improvement in the cognitive and language development of participant children.

The long term impacts of nutrition for children’s and countries’ development show that the current status quo, in which donors dedicate just 0.37% of Oversees Development Aid (ODA) to nutrition, is unacceptable and unsustainable. The Nutrition for Growth event could provide this historic change, and transform the lives of millions of children. Through the Scaling Up Nutrition movement, many developing countries have set out plans, with costings attached, on how they will tackle malnutrition. These plans are ready to be implemented, and all that is needed now is for them to be financed.

And now is a crucial time for these plans to be funded. With child mortality declining, many developing countries are in the next 20 years about to experience a demographic dividend – a larger number of children who will reach working age – can earn money, fuel economies and create prosperity. But these dividends will not generate pay-offs for countries if workers are unhealthy and poorly educated.

Addressing malnutrition is a key way to ensure children can learn and develop to their full potential.

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