Dakar — Malnutrition among children under age five in the Sahel is expected to rise again this year, despite decent rains and more or less average harvest predictions.
Yet as specialists collect robust evidence on the most effective ways to save the lives of 1.5 million children in the region – going beyond food to tackle malaria, boost healthcare, increase vaccination coverage and improve access to clean water as part of integrated packages – donors remain cautious about commitments.
Among the 6.9 million children who died under age five in 2011, just under half lived in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN Children’s Fund’s (UNICEF) 2013 State of the World’s Children report.
One third of these deaths took place in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali Niger and Nigeria, says medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), with malnutrition being the underlying cause in half of these cases.
“It’s huge,” said Stéphane Doyon, coordinator for the West Africa emergency unit of MSF. “We can’t separate mortality from malnutrition here.”
For the past two years the number of severely acutely malnourished children in the Sahel has risen, reaching 1.5 million in 2013. Combined with the number of under-fives and pregnant women who are moderately acutely malnourished (or experiencing “wasting”), the number of malnourished in the region reaches 5 million.
There are multiple reasons malnutrition cases have risen this year, including high food prices, conflict, high incidence rates of malaria and improved humanitarian coverage – which may mean better reporting of child malnutrition.
Other structural causes include weak health systems, deep poverty, poor water and sanitation conditions, and inadequate infant care practices, according to the health and nutrition NGO Alima.
In many Sahelian countries, treatment of children with severe acute malnutrition has reached a pretty much “optimal” level, said Alima’s West Africa director Augustin Augier.
In many places, NGOs, UNICEF, the World Food Programme (WFP) and governments have been working around the clock to save lives (albeit with major exceptions, such as northern Nigeria, where reaching children is a huge challenge).
