Going Beyond Saving Lives - Responding to the Silent Catastrophe of Malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Bapu Vaitla, Research Fellow, Action Against Hunger UK

…hunger feels like pincers,
like the bite of crabs,
it burns, burns and has no fire.

Hunger is a cold fire.
Let us sit down soon to eat
with all those who haven't eaten…

War, poverty and political apathy continue to claim the lives of nearly 30,000 children under the age of five every day. Yet, while this number remains appallingly high, the past few decades have in fact witnessed impressive declines in child mortality throughout the developing world, as the chart to the right shows. Improvements in public health backed by a growing willingness on the part of governments to protect the rights of the most vulnerable, have been especially important in saving the lives of small children. While the struggle against child mortality still continues, it is clear that on some fronts at least we are making progress.

Yet alongside this encouraging portrait of survival is a dark reality: the persistence of stunningly high rates of child malnutrition, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. In some of the worst-affected countries, including Ethiopia, Burundi, and Niger, nearly half of all children below the age of 5 are underweight, with one in every seven severely underweight. As the second chart shows, recent trends throughout Sub-Saharan Africa have not been encouraging: malnutrition is disturbingly stable and in the case of eastern Africa, on the rise.

The effect of malnutrition on children is devastating. Underfed children are more susceptible to illness and malnutrition is an important contributing factor in over half of child deaths stemming from infectious disease. In addition, malnutrition during the first few years of childhood negatively effects future cognitive and behavioral development. In these ways, the sadness of hunger reaches far beyond the immediate present and the pain of an empty belly.

Decades of impassioned activism and action have laid bare the extent of the horror of child death. Yet our consciousness has been slow to awaken to mortality’s cousin: the cold fire of malnutrition. It takes strength to help save lives; it takes an even greater strength to dedicate ourselves to help make those lives worth living, especially when to do so means engaging with complex questions of entrenched poverty, inequality, and discrimination. But in asking only for the justice of life, we have been too timid: let us also ask for the justice of eating.

…let us spread great tablecloths,
put salt in the lakes of the world,
set up planetary bakeries,
tables with strawberries in snow,
and a plate like the moon itself
from which we can all eat…

For now I ask no more
than the justice of eating.

  Pablo Neruda, ‘The Great Tablecloth’

***ENDS***

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