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.