Development Works Number 6, December 2012 | Page 3

food rich in iron and Vitamin A every day.” That translates into many more children who will be able to contribute fully to their communities. right policies and [programs] in place. Through SUN, these countries can influence and support others to do the same.” SUN is part of the energy—the increased global leadership and political commitment of recent years—that is fueling progress against hunger. Many of the poorest countries are sharing in this progress. The SUN Framework for Action includes tasks such as increasing children’s consumption of vitamins and minerals. “Making Snacks More Nutritious” was the theme of a meeting attended by Bread for the World Institute staff in Chaumala, a village outside the city of Dhangadhi in western Nepal. The gathering of about 25 women with young children was made possible by U.S. development assistance, which funded Nepal’s Action Against Malnutrition through Agriculture (AAMA) project. Young women demonstrated how to prepare and cook the snack, cutlets made of potatoes and seasonal green vegetables coated in an egg-based batter. They are a more nutritious but still affordable alternative to plain fried potatoes. Afterward everyone sampled the cutlets, served with sliced sweet potato. Luckily, they were a hit with their most important critics—the toddlers who most need those nutrients. Another key “component” of AAMA could be heard quite clearly: several squawking hens in a wooden coop. Parents need information (for example, growing children need protein) and skills (how to incorporate two eggs into a family meal). But, of course, children won’t actually consume more protein unless families can produce or purchase protein-rich foods. Training in poultry management is what makes it feasible to include eggs in the diets of young children from families of modest means. Once an AAMA participant receives training in how to keep poultry healthy, she is given a gift of five laying hens so her children can begin to benefit from eggs, a “renewable resource.” In Nepal, AAMA is implemented by U.S. nonprofit Helen Keller International. Its staff, almost all Nepali, keep careful records and use them to determine how well strategies or activities are working. During the five-year project, this region of Nepal improved by 42 percent to 92 percent in categories such as “the percentage of children ages 6 to 24 months who eat four or more food groups a day” and “the percentage of women and children who eat a plant-source Hunger Emergencies: Hindsight Is 20/20 In Mogadishu, Somalia, in July 2011, women wait for the distribution of food rations. They live in a camp for internally displaced people, having come to the capital city from other parts of Somalia in search of food. But this does not mean there is nothing the global community can do to respond effectively to hunger emergencies and save many lives. One reason for hope is progress on developing early warning systems. U.S. development assistance funds the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), which relies on sophisticated methods of gathering and analyzing data (trends in weather, food prices, malnutrition rates, livestock mortality, and so on). According to nonprofit development organizations Oxfam and Save the Children, in their 2012 report, A Dangerous Delay: The Cost of Late Response to Early Warnings in the 2011 Drought in the Horn of Africa, the early warning system functioned well, raising concerns in August 2010 and 36 percent 15 percent The “emergency threshold” malnutrition rate, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Malnutrition rate in southern Somalia when humanitarian aid began to rise significantly. 3 UN Photo/Stuart Price If there’s one time when prompt international assistance is urgently needed to save lives, it is when famine strikes. The most devastating recent example is Somalia in 2011. How did as many as 100,000 Somali children die of hunger in just months? Will the world be able to prevent future famines? Development assistance has no power to change many of the factors that contributed to the famine in Somalia. Two of these are armed conflict and the absence of a functioning national government; there are others.