Gates: countries must increase health funding to fight malnutrition

By Oyebola Owolabi

Countries must increase their health funding to boost children’s health and nutrition, especially in the face of global climate crisis, the Gates’ Foundation has said.

The Foundation, in its eighth annual Goalkeepers report, titled ‘A Race to Nourish a Warming World’, lamented that an additional 40 million children will be stunted, and another 28 million wasted between 2024 and 2050, due to climate change, if immediate action is not taken

“Scaling up solutions now can avoid this outcome, while also building resilience to climate change and spurring much-needed economic growth,” the report said.

WHO’s findings

In 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 148 million children experienced stunting, a condition where children don’t grow to their full potential mentally or physically, and 45 million children experienced wasting, a condition where children become weak and emaciated, leaving them at much greater risk of developmental delays and death.

The report added: “These are the most severe and irreversible forms of chronic and acute malnutrition. At the same time, as global challenges intensify, the total share of foreign aid going to Africa has decreased. In 2010, 40 per cent of foreign aid went to African countries. But that number is now down to just 25 per cent —the lowest percentage in 20 years—despite more than half of all child deaths occurring in sub-Saharan Africa.

“This trend leaves hundreds of millions of children at serious risk of dying or suffering from preventable diseases, and threatens the unprecedented progress the world made in global health across Africa between 2000 and 2020.”

Gates Speaks

In his contribution, Bill Gates lamented: “Today, the world is contending with more challenges than at any point in my adult life: inflation, debt, new wars. Unfortunately, aid isn’t keeping pace with these needs, particularly in the places that need it the most. I think we can give global health a second act—even in a world where competing challenges require governments to stretch their budgets.

“Malnutrition is the world’s worst child health crisis, and climate change is only making it worse.”

Amidst this crisis however, Gates calls for maintaining global health funding; immediately addressing the growing threat of child malnutrition by supporting the Child Nutrition Fund, a new platform that coordinates donor financing for nutrition; and governments fully funding the established institutions that have proven effective at protecting millions of lives each year.

These institutions include Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which is due to hold its next funding replenishment in 2025; and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is expected to also hold its replenishment next year.

“If we do these three things, we won’t just usher in a new global health boom and save millions of lives, we’ll also prove that humanity can still rise to meet our greatest challenges,” Gates noted.

Fighting Malnutrition

The report not only highlightes the catastrophic economic costs of malnutrition, it also provides proven solutions that can help mitigate them.

“The best way to fight the impacts of climate change is by investing in nutrition. Malnutrition makes every forward step our species wants to take heavier and harder. But the inverse is also true. If we solve malnutrition, we make it easier to solve every other problem. We solve extreme poverty. Vaccines are more effective, and deadly diseases like malaria and pneumonia become far less fatal,” Gates said.

According to the report, proven tools that are helping to solve malnutrition, build people’s resilience to the worst impacts of climate change, and further drive down childhood deaths include ‘new agricultural technologies that are producing up to two to three times more milk and safer milk, which can prevent millions of cases of child stunting by 2050, especially as evidenced in India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania, that these technologies can prevent 109 million cases of child stunting by 2050.

Others are fortifying salt and bouillon cubes with iodine and folic acid to reduce anemia and prevent deaths due to neural tube defects; providing high-quality prenatal Multiple Micronutrient Supplements (MMS) for pregnant women which could save almost half a million lives and improve birth outcomes for 25 million babies by 2040.

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