Governments and social leaders at all levels need to commit more attention and energy to the elimination of child malnutrition, one of the main barriers to faster progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Female leaders in particular have a special role to play.
In a perfect world, pregnant mothers should be properly fed in order to protect their own lives and determine the best conditions for their unborn children. They should breastfeed for at least six months and afterwards provide their babies with nutritious, balanced and cheap complementary (weaning) food. Unfortunately this is not the case for more than a quarter of boys and girls under the age of five in the developing world. Malnutrition is the underlying cause of half of all infant deaths and one of the emerging factors of the growing obesity and cardiovascular disease epidemics in most of the world.
World leaders committed to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in order to eradicate hunger, lower infant mortality, combat prevalent diseases, achieve universal primary education and improve the health and status of women by 2015. With only five years left, the prospects are not good. In the coming months, the MDGs will be discussed during summits of international organizations like the WHO, while meetings to prepare for the UN conference in September have already kicked off.
Female leaders should use these opportunities to push the battle against child malnutrition higher up the agenda. In recent years, growing numbers of women have assumed influential leadership roles in Africa, Asia and other parts of the developing world. These women, passionate about their people and their countries, represent the aspirations of women everywhere, but most importantly are also mothers and grandmothers. They can make a difference in this fight to improve nutrition and human development.
Efforts need to be renewed and commitments strengthened in a number of areas, but instruments and models are available.
To ensure children have a balanced diet with adequate energy, protein and micronutrients levels, diversified foods from local cultures need to be further developed. Systems should be established to guarantee local foods are properly processed in order to comply with safety standards and to ensure availability and access to these sources at all times and for all income levels. To set up these systems, governments have to collaborate with different stakeholders like nutrition specialists, NGOs and industry but also with local women, whose role in the food process — either on the field, in the shop or in the kitchen — is so prominent.
Health education plays a vital role and is essential within community development strategies to face the challenge of hunger and malnutrition. Women, who are still the primary carer for children, need to receive basic information on correct selection and use of foods and how to make the most of scarce resources. All means must be used to promote public health information, including policy development, social marketing and mass communication.
Finally, poor and emerging countries must learn from each other how to realize efficient health care solutions. Latin American countries, including Chile, have already proven the feasibility of this critical human development task. Pediatricians and public policy experts in these countries have successfully implemented free access to primary health care, basic nutrition education for women, promotion of breast feeding and complementary food provision in effective delivery networks. This is not an impossible task.
The Millennium Development Goals must be more than aspirational for the sake of the 9 million children that die every year in the developing world. Female leaders, who can relate because of their personal experiences as mothers, should be the catalysts for calling upon the global community to stand firm on their commitments and reverse the tragedy of child and maternal mortality. The MDG meetings planned in the following weeks and months provide a crucial window of opportunity for female leaders to make a difference.
Jorge Jiménez de la Jara, MD MPH, is a Professor of Public Health at Universidad Católica de Chile and Former Chairman Executive Board of the World Health Organization (2001).
