NEW YORK, SEPT 17 – The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation today urged world leaders to increase global health spending in the most important direction of improving children’s health and nutrition, especially in the face of the climate crisis.
In the report Goalkeepers the eighth annual titled A Race to Nourish a Warming World, the foundation projects that without immediate global action, climate change will condemn an additional 40 million children to stunting and another 28 million to malnutrition between 2024 and 2050.
Efforts to scale up solutions now can avoid those expectations while building resilience to climate change and driving much-needed economic growth.
In 2023, the World Health Organization estimates that 148 million children suffer from stunting, a condition in which children do not fully develop mentally or physically, and 45 million children suffer from malnutrition causing children to be weak and thin dry and exposed to a greater risk for developmental delay and death. This is the most severe and irreversible form of chronic and acute malnutrition.
At the same time, the total share of foreign aid going to Africa has fallen sharply, from 40 percent in 2010 to just 25 percent, the lowest percentage in 20 years.
This trend puts hundreds of millions of children more at risk of dying or suffering from preventable diseases and also threatens the world’s unprecedented progress in global health across Africa between 2000 and 2020.
“Today, the world faces more challenges than at any time in my adult life: inflation, debt, new wars. Unfortunately, aid has not kept pace with this need, especially in the places that need it most,” said report author Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“I think we can give global health a second leg – even in a challenging world that requires governments to stretch their budgets,” Gates added.
The report calls for sustaining global health funding to urgently address the growing threat of child malnutrition by supporting the Child Nutrition Fund, a new platform that aligns donor funding for nutrition and governments that fully fund established institutions.
The platform has proven to be effective in protecting millions of lives every year.
The report also highlights the devastating economic costs of malnutrition as well as solutions that can help reduce it. According to the World Bank, malnutrition causes productivity losses of US$3 trillion each year because malnutrition affects physical and cognitive ability. In low-income countries, the losses ranged from 3 percent to 16 percent or more of GDP, amounting to 2008-level global recessions each year. – Xinhua
