More than 1 billion adolescent girls and women suffer from undernutrition, deficiencies in essential micronutrients, and anemia. Women and girls are disproportionately impacted by malnutrition — and their poor nutrition bears generational consequences.
Tagged: newborn health
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Undernutrition is associated with 45% of child deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Supporting women who are able to breastfeed is essential to preventing child deaths. More than 820,000 children under 5 years old could be saved each year if all children were optimally breastfed in their first two years of life. The importance of fathers’ support in this endeavor cannot be understated.
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The numbers are shocking. Each year, 2.8 million babies die during their first 28 days of life, while almost 800 women die every day in pregnancy or childbirth.
A vast majority of these deaths are preventable through simple interventions: providing mothers and their children with access to basic, quality health care, especially during pregnancy and childbirth; encouraging mothers to breastfeed; and treating diarrhea and pneumonia, two of the leading killers of children under 5 years of age.
Despite the impressive progress that has been made in recent years, achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (MDGs 4, 5 and 6) by 2015 will require an all-out global push.
In June, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced a major realignment of US$2.9 billion of its resources to “save up to half of a million children from preventable deaths by the end of 2015.” In addition, USAID introduced an ambitious strategy, Acting on the Call: Ending Preventable Child and Maternal Deaths, to dramatically increase progress in 24 countries that account for 70 percent of child and maternal deaths.
This is an important policy shift — one that has the potential to have great impact on development by saving the lives of 15 million children and nearly 600,000 women by 2020. FHI 360, a member of the Advisory Group for Acting on the Call, supports USAID’s commitment. We have seen how evidence-based interventions in maternal, newborn and child health are making a difference in communities around the world.