The Campaign to End Malnutrition :: Campaign Concept

The Campaign

The Problem

The Solution

How to Help

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The Campaign Concept

Global hunger can seem so large, so overwhelming, it’s easy to assume individual efforts don’t add up to much.

But if we break it down into its constituent parts, it suddenly becomes more manageable: we quickly see that global hunger is far from monolithic, and that there are clear steps we can take as individuals to make a difference. Once we unpack the concept of “global hunger,” a new narrative suddenly comes into focus—a new way of understanding what was long considered an unstoppable force. And this new story of global hunger reveals something startling: that it’s now possible to end acute malnutrition and save the approximately 5 million children who perish each year from this preventable disease.

We now have the tools to eradicate acute malnutrition. Here’s the new story.

Ending Acute Malnutrition: An Historic Opportunity

Global hunger consists of chronic and acute malnutrition, and on any given day more than one billion people suffer from one form or the other. Acute malnutrition, however, is the more immediate killer: it afflicts some 55 million children worldwide, threatens 19 million children with outright starvation, and results in as many as 5 million childhood deaths each year—a tragedy of pandemic proportions.

This loss of life is all the more tragic because it’s relatively easy to address:

1. Preventable: We know how to save starving children if we can reach them.
2. Predictable: We know where and when acute malnutrition is likely to strike.
3. Cost-Effective: $50 can provide life-saving treatment for a starving child, whereas prevention costs 27 cents a day for a 6 month program.

On a world map, areas of famine and starvation often overlap areas of war and conflict, and seasonal food crises routinely result in malnutrition. That is, we know where and when malnutrition is likely to take place and how to treat and prevent it. And while we know how to save these starving children if we can reach them, only about 3% ever receive the treatment they need each year—i.e., we haven’t found a way to ensure coverage for the millions of children who die from acute malnutrition.

The good news is we now have the tools to change this: life-saving, nutrient-dense, “ready-to-use-foods” (RUFs) have been developed that can save the lives of children at a much larger scale while we work address the underlying causes of hunger over the longer-term.

Learn about the problem of acute malnutrition.