African Proverb

The hunger of one …

… is the shame of all!

Marie Ruel

IFPRIOctober 14, 2010Des Moines, Iowa

Why a Global Hunger Index?

• Raise awareness of regional and country differences in hunger

• Help learn from successes and failures in hunger reduction

• Provide incentives to act and improve international ranking

• Focus on one special hunger-related topic every year

Targeted to policymakers, donors, media, public

GHI measures three dimensions of hunger

• Undernourishment: (% population with insufficient food/calories)

• Child malnutrition (% < 5 underweight)

• Child mortality (<5 years)

Looking at trends between 1990-2010

Countries ranked on a 100-point scale

Min and max values not observed in practice

There has been progress since 1990

24% 14% 25%

40% 33% 44%

Country performance: by severity

29 countries: “alarming" or “extremely alarming” levels of hunger

Country progress

Winners and losers from 1990 GHI to 2010 GHI

Countries with both GHI 1990 and GHI 2010 less than five are excluded

Fighting the Crisis of Early Childhood Undernutrition

Child underweight contributes 7.4 of 15.1 points to GHI score (nearly half):• South Asia: underweight accounts for > half of

score• SSAfrica: underweight has improved very slightly

from 1990-2010 (from 27% to 24%)Countries need to accelerate progress in improving

child nutrition in order to improve their GHI scores

The perilous 1,000 days

Weight-for-height

Weight-for-age

Height-for-age

-9 to 24 mo

How to improve child nutrition?

Policy recommendations

• Target nutrition interventions to the window of opportunity

• Tackle the underlying conditions that cause undernutrition

• Foster gender equity

• Prioritize nutrition in political and policy processes

• Engage, empower, and ensure sustained support for local actors in the area of nutrition

• Available in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian

• Download from www.ifpri.org

• Embed interactive Worldhunger Map

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• Available as an interactive book, as e-book, for your Kindle, iPad, or mobile phone