A tipping point for MNCH and nutrition? Reflections on an UN-usual General Assembly

Last week, I joined development colleagues from around the globe in New York for activities surrounding the 69th U.N. General Assembly, where leaders discussed urgent global issues. While ISIS in the Middle East and the terrifying Ebola outbreak in West Africa were understandably forefront in people’s minds and in media headlines, I am proud that Canada also continued to champion another critical issue: saving millions of women and children who would otherwise die of completely preventable causes.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Every Woman, Every Child event saw Canada, Norway and the United States mobilize more than $4 billion for a Global Financing Facility set up by the World Bank with the goal of saving and improving the lives of women and children as well as accelerating progress to achieve the health Millennium Development Goals before the end of 2015.

Fighting malnutrition will be essential to meet that goal. Last year, 6.3 million children died of preventable causes. Almost half of those deaths were related to undernutrition. For those children who survive, millions live with that bright spark of potential dimmed due to malnutrition’s ravaging effects. It is unconscionable that 162 million children in the world today suffer from stunting — permanently damaged and weakened for life — because they didn’t get the nutrition many of us take for granted as we raise our own children. The scale of malnutrition and its particular impact on the most vulnerable segments of society globally is one of the ugliest symptoms of injustice and inequity that exist in the world today. We can and must do more to change this.