ESSAY 5
Peter Verbiscar-Brown/Photoshare
Why Development Assistance Can’t Wait
At the Punwami Child Feeding Program run by Crescent Medical Aid in
Kenya, children receive their noon meal. There are usually more than
30 children given a meal each day.
SNAPSHOT
• Foreign assistance focuses on prevention. This is critical in the
case of early childhood nutrition and, of course, when there is a
possibility of famine.
• Malnutrition is most dangerous during the 1,000-day window
between pregnancy and age 2, when it can cause death or
irreversible physical and cognitive damage. Early childhood
malnutrition can also drain a country’s development potential.
• Yet early malnutrition can be prevented at a modest cost with
basic nutrition care.
• Famine early warning systems are now sophisticated, forecasting
accurately up to a year in advance. Foreign assistance cannot
prevent natural disasters, but it can help save many lives.
• The potential human consequences of inaction—particularly
for children under 2—should be weighed carefully in decisions
about emergency relief.
• U.S. development assistance should focus on resilience—
equipping people to develop strategies to cope with threats to
their food security.
We’ve all heard the old adages on procrastination: a stitch in time saves nine and so
forth. The temptation is to just pay lip service. Maybe this latest problem isn’t truly
urgent. A homeowner, for example, may say
to herself, maybe I’ll have more time/money/enthusiasm for repairing the gutters next
week—or next month.
It’s quite possible that nothing will go
wrong if the gutter repairs are put off. On
the other hand, a bad storm could cause water damage to the interior of the house. The
homeowner is playing the odds: what is the
likelihood of the worst-case scenario, and
how bad would it be if it did happen?
Development Works explains why U.S. development assistance is important. This essay
offers two examples—each affecting hundreds of millions of people—of why development assistance cannot wait until we have
more money or enthusiasm for it.
Opening the Window
of Opportunity
We all know that very young children develop quickly. One day they can barely sit up, and
three months later, they’re walking. It’s almost
literally “blink and you miss it.”
The scientific consensus is that this
period—from pregnancy through a child’s
second birthday—is the most important time
www.bread.org/institute
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Development Works 27