Concern aiming to stem malnutrition

A PROJECT to prevent and reduce malnutrition and its irreversible effects on young children will be launched by Concern Worldwide today.

The five-year €3.7 million project in Zambia will receive one-third of its funding from Irish food business Kerry Group.

Pregnant women and children under two will be the focus of the Realigning Agriculture to Improve Nutrition project. The first 1,000 days is a “critical period” of a child’s “most rapid development, Concern said.

It will target 3,500 households in the Mumbwa district of western Zambia, where 59 per cent of pre-school children have stunted growth due to malnutrition.

Concern hopes to use the project as a model which can be scaled up and replicated in the rest of Zambia and other parts of the world to help prevent undernutrition, stunting and child deaths.

Stunting causes 3.5 million deaths each year and has a long-lasting impact on a child’s physical and mental development. The project will “combine agriculture with early nutrition interventions to tackle this massive humanitarian issue,” said Stan McCarthy, chief executive of Kerry Group.

Among the initiatives will be an increase in year-round availability of good-quality foods through improved production at household level, and spreading information on nutrition and health practices.

An evaluation of the project will be carried out by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.

The project “builds on the commitment made by the Irish and US governments last year to recognise, with practical actions and projects, the importance of adequate nutrition in the critical 1,000 days from pregnancy to age two,” Concern Worldwide chief executive Tom Arnold said.