On Tuesday, June 8 join "COVID Recovery: Why investments in nutrition cannot wait", a session during the WHO Food Systems Summit Dialogues: Health Talks discussing the impact of the pandemic and the urgency to prioritize nutrition in COVID-19 recovery policy. The webinar will share response planning solutions that are ripe for investment. If we fail to act, this crisis will reverse a decade of progress in nutrition and particularly impact women and children.
The pandemic continues to have a devastating impact worldwide, exacerbated by underlying structural inequity – creating more hunger and nutrition insecurity for those most vulnerable, including women and children. The Standing Together for Nutrition Consortium brought leading economists and nutritionists together with experts in food and health systems to model the impacts of the pandemic for maternal and child nutrition. The data resulted in three different scenarios - optimistic, moderate, and pessimistic. Given the acceleration of the pandemic in many low- and middle-income countries, particularly in populous countries in South Asia that had high rates of malnutrition pre-COVID, the real impact may be even more devastating than anticipated.
In these settings, the consequences may be closer to the most pessimistic scenario, with the possibility of an additional 13.6 million wasted children, 3.6 million stunted children, and 283,000 child deaths by 2022. The potential dramatic effects of this crisis on human life and well-being, alongside the long-term negative consequences on human capital development and economic growth, make investments in nutrition imperative. Governments and donors must make nutrition a priority to build resilience and a promising future for all.