4. Advancing the Millennium Development Goals
by Improving Nutrition
Meeting the MDGs requires immediate coordinated
nutrition intervention implementation at scale. Malnutrition remains the single largest cause of child mortality—an
estimated 35 percent of child deaths are due to malnutrition.21,22 If all children under the age of five were well nourished, seven fewer children would die every minute.23 Since
nutrition and health are fundamentally linked, efforts on
MDG 1: Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty contributes to achieving MDG 4: Reduce child mortality. Figure
2 below outlines how the MDGs relate to the burden of undernutrition.
It is an