By Gregorio Igartúa
Special to The Star
As President Donald Trump suspends a large share of foreign aid, the winner of my annual win-a-trip contest is reflecting on her reporting with me in Africa. The winner, Trisha Mukherjee, has written guest columns about menstruation as an impediment to education and about breastfeeding to save babies’ lives.
As I’ve written, the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the uncertainty around foreign aid seem to me a terrible mistake, deriving from a misperception that aid does no good. So I asked Trisha to recount the malnutrition we saw as well as the solutions that ease it. Here’s what Trisha wrote:
In a one-room clinic in rural Madagascar, a wide-eyed baby boy named Mercia watched as his mother tore open a packet of something that looked like peanut butter. Mercia devoured the paste, leaving traces all over his cheeks.
Malnutrition isn’t always something we think much about, but every year it’s a factor in the deaths of 2 million children younger than 5 worldwide. One-fifth of all children in that age group are stunted from malnutrition. But these packets — which public health workers call “small quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements” — prevent that malnutrition, for just $36 for a year’s supply. Mercia’s yummy morning treat could save his life.
While reporting with Nick, I saw wrenching scenes of children starving, of families with nothing to eat, of kids reduced to surviving off wild plants because drought had caused crops to fail. But I also found that preventing stunting and starvation is not just possible but logistically feasible and cost-effective.
“It may be the single most powerful investment you’ve never really heard of,” said Shawn Baker, chief program officer of Helen Keller Intl, which works to end global malnutrition.
In Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, Tantely Raharinirina hauled two hefty buckets of a nutritious porridge between tin lean-tos and over open sewers. Mothers and children emerged to buy a serving — fortified with essential nutrients — for the equivalent of 10 cents. Nutri’zaza, the social enterprise that provides the porridge, shows that lifesaving food doesn’t have to be expensive.
In a factory in Nairobi, Kenya, I saw another solution, this one for children suffering from severe malnutrition. A father-daughter team, Dhiren and Nikita Chandaria, produce therapeutic foods to stabilize even dangerously ill children — and the course of treatment costs about $50. Malnutrition, I saw on this trip, is a vast and underaddressed problem — but also one that we can solve if we commit to it.
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