The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is calling on world leaders to increase global health spending in areas needed to improve children's health and nutrition, especially in the face of the global climate crisis.
The foundation made the call in its eighth annual Goalkeepers report released Tuesday.
The Goalkeepers report, “A Race to Feed a Warming World,” projects that without immediate global action, climate change would impact 40 million more children with stunting and 28 million more with wasting between 2024 and 2050.
It is noted that scaling up urgent solutions can prevent this outcome, while building resilience to climate change and stimulating much-needed economic growth.
“In 2023, the World Health Organization estimated that 148 million children experienced stunting, a condition in which children do not grow to their full mental or physical potential.
“And 45 million children suffered from wasting, a condition in which children become weak and emaciated, leaving them at much higher risk of developmental delays and death.
“These are the most serious and irreversible forms of chronic and acute malnutrition,” he said.
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The foundation noted that as global challenges intensify, the overall share of foreign aid going to Africa has declined.
In 2010, 40 percent of foreign aid was reportedly allocated to African countries, but that figure has since dropped to 25 percent, the lowest percentage in 20 years, even though more than half of all child deaths occur in Africa.
According to the foundation, the trend leaves hundreds of millions of children at serious risk of dying or suffering from preventable diseases and threatens the unprecedented progress the world has made in global health in Africa between 2000 and 2020.
Bill Gates, co-chairman of the foundation, said: “Today, the world faces more challenges than at any time in my adult life: inflation, debt, new wars.
“Unfortunately, aid is not keeping pace with these needs, particularly in the places that need it most.
“I believe we can give global health a second chance, even in a world where competing challenges require governments to stretch their budgets,” he said.
According to Mr Gates, malnutrition is the world's worst child health crisis and climate change is only making it worse.
In the midst of this crisis, Mr. Gates called for maintaining global health funding to immediately address the growing threat of child malnutrition by supporting the Child Nutrition Fund.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the fund is a new platform that coordinates donor funding for nutrition. Governments are fully funding established institutions that have proven effective in protecting millions of lives each year.
These institutions include Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which are expected to replenish their funding in 2025.
“If we do these three things, we will not only usher in a new global health boom and save millions of lives, but we will also demonstrate that humanity can still meet our greatest challenges,” Gates said.
The report also highlights the catastrophic economic costs of malnutrition and solutions that can help mitigate them.
According to the World Bank, the cost of malnutrition is $3 trillion in lost productivity each year, because malnutrition affects people's physical and cognitive abilities.
He noted that in low-income countries, this loss ranges from 3 percent to 16 percent or more of GDP, equivalent to a permanent global recession at the level of 2008 every year.
Speaking about proven tools to combat malnutrition, Mr. Gates said investing in nutrition was the best way to combat the impacts of climate change.
“If we solve malnutrition, we make it easier to solve all the other problems. We solve extreme poverty. Vaccines are more effective and deadly diseases like malaria and pneumonia become much less lethal,” Gates said.
Featured tools include new agricultural technologies that are boosting milk production and safety to prevent millions of cases of childhood stunting by 2050.
“Models show that in India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, these technologies can prevent 109 million cases of childhood stunting by 2050,” Gates said.
Gates also highlights efforts to expand new ways to fortify pantry staples like salt and bouillon cubes, which could reduce millions of cases of anemia and prevent deaths due to neural tube defects.
“In Nigeria, fortifying bouillon cubes with iron, folic acid, zinc and vitamin B12 could prevent up to 16.6 million cases of anaemia and up to 11,000 deaths from neural tube defects,” she said.
She added that efforts to provide a high-quality prenatal vitamin to pregnant women could save nearly half a million lives and improve birth outcomes for 25 million babies by 2040.
The philanthropist said that adopting multiple micronutrient supplements (MMS) costs as little as $2.60 for the entire pregnancy in all low- and middle-income countries.
Mr. Gates also highlights how promising new research into the microbiome could improve people's health.
According to him, studies indicate that better gut health can help children absorb nutrients, develop strong immune systems and grow as they should.
“A deeper understanding of gut health has the potential to change not only the way the world treats malnutrition but also overnutrition, which plagues rich countries,” Gates said.
NAN reports that the foundation, through the Goalkeepers report, monitors progress on 18 key indicators of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The goals were adopted by the United Nations to address global challenges and end extreme poverty, inequality and climate change by 2030.
(YAYA)
