COVID-19 led to an increase in global food prices. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine further raised prices. While some of that has abated, global food prices are still 25% higher than they were before the pandemic.
There is a solution to this problem in many low-income countries—Simple fortified foods.
Fortifying foods with basic and necessary nutrients is easy and inexpensive. For example, there’s a successful program in Mali to overcome childhood malnutrition by way of fortified foods.
The problem begins with awareness. Many parents in Mali’s remote rural villages simply do not know their children are malnourished. Tragically, they think unusual thinness, crying and even lack of energy and movement are normal.
Community volunteers trained by the NGO World Neighbors help parents identify and understand malnutrition. They test children using a simple scale. They then train parents on how to feed their infants and other children to obtain proper nutrients.
A key part of this training is in how to prepare enriched porridge that meets childrens’ basic nutritional needs. This porridge is only marginally more expensive than the non-enriched variety. Even then, it is relatively quiet inexpensive.
Enriched porridge will not in and of itself solve rural Mali’s malnutrition problem. But it will allow many children to grow up without the impediments of one of poverty’s greatest harms. And it will do it at very low cost .
