How often does a child die of hunger

10 Facts About Child Hunger in the World

While hunger is a devastating reality for millions of children around the world, we have the power to save them. Nearly 60% of the people we serve are children, many of whom are malnourished. Through programs including First 1,000 Days, school meals and support to small-scale farmers, the United Nations World Food Programme is on the frontlines of the fight against childhood hunger.

From Nigeria to Syria, children across the globe face the risks of severe hunger. Those who survive may be plagued with lifelong effects ranging from stunted growth to weakened immunity to illnesses like the common cold.

Here are the ten most important things to know about childhood hunger and what the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is doing to fight it.

1. A Child Dies Every 10 Seconds From Malnutrition

It’s a tragic truth that more than 3 million children die from hunger every year. And between conflict, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of hungry children is on the rise.

Photo: Elio Rujano

Three-year old Leonel eats lunch at his home in Venezuela. He gets a U.N. World Food Programme take-home ration every week as part of our new school meals program in his country.

2. Nearly Half of All Deaths Among Children Under 5 Are Caused by Hunger

A child’s death sends shockwaves through a community and sadly, 45% of young lives under the age of five are lost to hunger and hunger-related causes.

For families facing poverty, conflict, extreme weather events and displacement, finding nutritious food for children every day can be nearly impossible.

Photo: WFP/Mohammed Awadh

At 12, Amina has lived through five years of war. “The war can get you in many ways,” she says. “People suffer when their homes are taken away. People die of hunger and there is not enough water.”

3. Kids Are Most at Risk of Starvation in Conflict Zones

Children bear the brunt of the inevitable spread of hunger that comes with ongoing violence. Children living in countries ravaged by war are more than twice as likely to be malnourished as their peers, and 40% of all displaced people are children.

Photo: WFP/Tsiory Andriantsoarana

Retoboha gets her arm measured by U.N. World Food Programme staff in Madagascar, where malnutrition in kids under 5 has almost doubled this year in the face of drought and insecurity.

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4. 45 Million Kids Suffer From Severe Malnutrition Every Year

It’s a staggering number and one with far-reaching consequences. Young children and infants depend on their caregivers for nutrient-dense foods that support their growth, development and immunity. But in low-income or conflict-ridden countries, nutritious foods are often out of reach.

5. Young Girls Are Especially at Risk of Hunger

More than 60% of the world’s hungriest people are women and girls. Inequality – from early marriage and young motherhood to cultural barriers and lack of education – means girls are much more likely to be malnourished, causing immediate and long-term health problems.

6. Children Are More Than Twice as Likely to Face Extreme Poverty

More than 350 million children face the reality of extreme poverty and that means facing hunger every day. Parents surviving extreme poverty – defined as living on less than $1.90 per day – have to make regular, often heartbreaking decisions when balancing the cost of food with housing, healthcare and other basic needs.

Photo: WFP/Arete/Fredrik Lerneryd

Maitre’s arm is measured during a routine check-up in Kalemie, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Maitre became malnourished in 2020 after his family was displaced due to conflict. He has now made a full recovery thanks to nutrition support from the U.N. World Food Programme.

7. Countries Across Africa Have Some of the Highest Rates of Child Malnutrition in the World

According to data from 2020, families across the African continent are amongst the most highly impacted by food insecurity and child hunger. This is due to recurring natural disasters, conflicts and poverty, From South Sudan to Ethiopia, a shocking 61 million children are experiencing stunted growth due to malnutrition. However, while Africa has some of the highest rates of childhood hunger, Asia is home to the highest number of children facing hunger.

8. The COVID-19 Pandemic Pushed Millions More Children Into Hunger

The pandemic continues to drive families into hunger and poverty, hitting the world’s most vulnerable children especially hard. When schools closed in over 199 countries, an estimated 370 million children were affected by the creeping impacts of hunger. By March 2021, 252 million children were still missing out meals provided in school.

Photo: WFP/Sayed Asif Mahmud

Yasin helps his younger brother Junayed learn about animals in Bangladesh. Their family gets a weekly food package from the U.N. World Food Programme to help them stay healthy.

9. Giving Kids Early and Regular Access to Nutritious Meals Saves Lives

When a child has daily access to healthy meals and other critical resources like health services and vaccines, they’re able to focus on learning, growing and enjoying their childhood. Our School Meals program serves as an essential safety net, providing more than 15 million school children around the world with lifesaving nutrition, health, education and hope. In the face of COVID-19 related school closures, we adapted our school meals program – the largest of its kind in the world – to provide food vouchers and take-home rations so children could continue to eat healthy foods.

10. More Than Half of WFP’s Beneficiaries Are Children

The most crucial nutritional window for a child happens between conception and their second birthday – their first 1,000 days of life. That’s why we step in to support pregnant and breastfeeding mothers and young children with the nutrition support they need. In 2020, we reached more than 17 million mothers and children through preventative and nutrition treatment programs. In fact, 57% of the people that the U.N. World Food Programme serves are children.

Childhood hunger is one of the biggest – and most preventable – issues of our time. But kids don’t have to go hungry. Through school meals, our First 1,000 Days programs and more, the U.N. World Food Programme is doing everything we can to save them.

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Does a child die of hunger every 10 seconds?

Published
18 June 2013

By Ruth Alexander

BBC News

Every 15 seconds a child dies of hunger, says a campaign by charities urging G8 leaders to pledge more aid for the world's poorest families - or every 10 seconds, according to the latest version of the slogan. But does this paint an accurate picture?

There is enough food for everyone, but not everyone has enough food, says the Enough Food for Everyone If campaign.

"In every minute of every day, four children die of hunger," intones the comedian Eddie Izzard in one of If's promotional videos, before the 15-second figure was updated to 10 seconds on 6 June.

The stat is a variation on another, used seven years ago in the Make Poverty History campaign - when a host of celebrities from the world of music, cinema and fashion appeared on a video clicking their fingers at regular intervals. Then the message was that a child dies unnecessarily as a result of extreme poverty every three seconds.

Stats about deaths occurring every few seconds have been around for years.

This latest, the 10-second one, is based on a figure from a very reputable source - The Lancet, an internationally renowned journal which recently published a paper saying that more than three million children died of undernutrition in 2011.

To get their attention-grabbing statistic, the If campaign managers have divided the number of seconds in a year by that number - three million.

It resonates with people more than the three million figure itself, according to If spokesman Jack Lundie.

"Large figures are notoriously difficult to visualise and imagine, especially when you get into millions," he says.

"Also we want to focus on the individual, and these expressions help to humanise a problem. So we need a short, accessible phrase that in a short period of time will convey both the emotional impact of the problem that we're addressing, but also give that sense of scale and urgency that will precipitate some kind of action."

But another major group that tackles food problems around the world, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), now disapproves of this tactic.

"There's a real temptation to use those kinds of statistics because they really do grab the headlines - you can't ignore that because it's such a horrifying image," says Jane Howard, from the WFP.

But, she says, it is "a bit misleading".

The WFP itself once used to claim that a child died of hunger every six seconds, but stopped using this slogan around 2008.

The numbers can change from year to year, Howard points out, depending on the latest research, "and it gets very confusing because the old figures end up lying around on the internet".

And more importantly, she argues, "the science is actually saying something quite different".

So what is the science saying? Well, if, to you, the claim that one child is dying every 10 seconds because of hunger conjures up images of starving children, you might be surprised.

In most cases, that's not what's happening.

"There are certainly extreme circumstances where children starve to death - and I'm thinking of the recent famine in parts of Somalia," Howard says.

"But the truth is that the vast majority of those numbers that we're talking about, are children who, because they haven't had the right nutrition in the very earliest parts of their lives, are really very susceptible to infectious diseases, like measles.

"A child that's had good nutrition would just shrug it off, but for a child that's really fragile and has a compromised immune system it becomes really life threatening."

The If campaign highlights an important issue, but is it wrong to use the word "hunger" if it might inaccurately suggest children are starving to death?

"I could understand if members of the public made that inference, and that would be mistaken," Lundie says. "We're not saying that children in this particular instance are starving to death, and we explain exactly how it works. But I think the term 'hunger' is something that people relate to."

The fact that poor nutrition is identified as an underlying cause of death means that there's also some double counting going on. When you hear that one child dies every few seconds from water-related diseases, for example- or from poverty - some of these children will be the same ones that are said to be dying every few seconds from hunger.

Another surprise is to discover who these children are and that they are often not even, as the adverts sometimes put it, "going to bed hungry".

Most of the nutrition-related deaths are in countries that are not suffering from famine or conflict, according to Professor Robert Black of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States, who calculated the three million figure that the 10-seconds statistic is based on.

"These are not the poorest countries in the world. They are countries such as India or Nigeria or many other countries in Asia or Africa that really could do better - that have the resources to feed children within the country.

"Certainly the poorest have the greatest problems with undernutrition, but even then there might be sufficient food to feed children. The difficulty is achieving a high enough quality diet - a diet that is dominated by cereals or starches would not be a high enough quality diet to achieve the nutrition that's needed in the first two years of life."

In most cases, the problem could be resolved through nutrition education, Black says.

In some cultures, women don't get to eat the best food in the household, which can mean children are born underweight. Milk and meat may also be avoided for cultural reasons, as they are in parts of India for example. And sometimes it's just not fully appreciated how important fruit and vegetables are.

A quarter of the deaths can be attributed to inadequate breast-feeding, Professor Black estimates, -with many families not realising that, up to six months of age, babies need to be exclusively fed on breast milk for the nutrients it provides, but also because it protects them from exposure to contaminated food.

So there's a much more complicated picture than the headline statistic - that one child dies every 10 seconds because of hunger - suggests.

But you have to simplify a message if you are to get people's attention, according to Jack Lundie.

"Yes, it may be that in what we would call our top-line messaging you don't get all the information about the entire problem, but I don't think it would be realistic to expect that to happen from a very short piece of communication.

"In terms of creating a conversation in which people can be informed, you first have to get their attention - their emotional attention. People are very busy so you need an instantly accessible understanding to open a conversation."

Poor nutrition is a serious problem - the three million children who are thought to have died because of it in 2011 represent almost half of all infant deaths. But there are signs of progress.

"There's been a decrease in the number of excess deaths - not a very large decrease - but still some improvement since we last studied this [in 2008], and the attention given to these issues of nutrition in low- and middle-income countries has really increased remarkably in the last five years," says Prof Black.

"I'm very optimistic that the world is now paying attention to the problems and will find the solutions."

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Every third child who died in the world is a victim of hunger

November 12, 2009

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Image caption,

Africa continues to have the worst child mortality rate

One in three childhood deaths is from starvation, the UN found, and the economic crisis has only exacerbated the humanitarian situation in a world where 200 million children are chronically malnourished.

Child malnutrition is one of the leading causes of child mortality in the world. 65 out of a thousand children die before reaching the age of five. In Russia, 13 out of 1,000 children die in infancy.

Last year, 8.8 million children died, and one in three children died of hunger, said Ann Veneman, Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

Children starve to death

If a woman does not eat well during pregnancy, or if the child does not receive proper nutrition in the first years of life, the physical and mental growth and development of the child slows down.

An estimated 200 million children are now at risk of hunger-related health problems.

Malnutrition in the early years leads to stunted growth and underdevelopment, the child will perform poorly in school, and in adulthood he will be at risk of chronic diseases, UNICEF experts write.

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The foundation's specialists note that the first 1000 days in a baby's life are very important, and especially during this period, he must eat right.

Africa and Asia are the most vulnerable

More than 90% of children at risk of stunted growth due to malnutrition live in Africa and Asia. In Africa, 132 out of 1,000 children do not live to the age of five.

The worse the situation in the country with the position of women in society, the worse things are with the nutrition of children, the organization says.

In the 2000s, world leaders pledged to halve the rate of infant mortality by 2015 compared to the 1990s.

There are indeed some improvements, the UN says, child mortality rates have dropped by 28% over the past 20 years, but not enough. According to UNICEF, only 63 out of 117 countries will be able to achieve the goal.

Among the measures that will help reduce infant mortality, UNICEF names the promotion of breastfeeding and vitamin A intake.

Hunger in the world

The economic crisis has worsened the already difficult humanitarian situation in the world.

According to the latest UN data, one seventh of the population is starving, more than a billion people suffer from food shortages.

High food prices, military conflicts and adverse climatic conditions, drought and floods, further complicate the situation in developing countries.

The problem of world hunger is planned to be discussed in Rome on November 16 at a meeting organized by the UN.

The head of the UN World Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) pledged on Saturday 14 November not to eat for a whole day in solidarity with the world's hungry.

Child Hunger Statistics - Food for Life Global

Child hunger worldwide is a serious problem affecting several million children, especially in low- and middle-income countries.

Hunger among children exacerbates the cycle of poverty that continues from generation to generation. Hungry teens find it difficult to focus on lessons or develop life skills, making it difficult for them to find work and support families as adults. This, in turn, can lead to increased child poverty and more hungry children in the future.

Rumbling in the stomach due to a missed meal is not the same as childhood hunger. Rather, it refers to a teenager who is facing food insecurity or is regularly denied healthy food, resulting in malnutrition or malnutrition. Chronic malnutrition is synonymous with hunger in terms of global poverty.

Nutrition is vital to human health, but even more so in childhood. When we are young, we need special care and attention when it comes to what we eat. We need to make sure we get enough of the essential nutrients that support our growth. This is one of the most pressing issues when it comes to world hunger. Millions of children around the world are born with limited access to the right amount and variety of food needed to maintain a healthy diet. Young children need enough proper nutrition to support:

Healthy growing body
Formation and functioning of organs
Strong immune system
Strong intestinal bacteria
Neurological and cognitive development.

Without proper nutrition, young children can quickly become malnourished, leading to a number of serious health problems. Growth slows down, the immune system is weakened, the body becomes fragile, and life forms cannot form. This leaves the child vulnerable to illness and disease, prone to poverty and can lead to premature death.

How many children are hungry in the world?

Research conducted by UNICEF in 2018 showed that 3.1 million children die each year from malnutrition, that's 45% of children under the age of 5 in developing countries. One in six children (100 million) in developing countries is underweight, and one in four children worldwide is stunted. Globally, 50.5 million children were estimated to be "wasted" (low weight for height), and 150 million children under the age of five were considered detained in 2017. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region where child hunger is the most common in the world, with one in four undernourished. Child hunger is also common in many parts of Asia and South America.

Sub-Saharan: 22%
Caribbean: 17. 7%
South Asia: 14.4%
South East Asia: 11.5%
Western Asia: 10.6%

Child hunger is also a problem in the more developed countries of North America and Europe. Families living in relative poverty struggle to feed their children, and many of them also live on the streets without access to proper nutrition.

Why is child hunger a problem?

Every child born on this planet has the right to eat. Unfortunately, we live in a world where we have enough food for everyone, but not everyone has enough food. The biggest problem with childhood hunger is the effect of hunger on the developing child. Malnutrition leads to early developmental problems that can cause growth retardation, disease, and disease problems. Being born into poverty is the beginning of a life of great disadvantage. When you don't have access to food, you have very few opportunities to grow, be healthy, happy, and have opportunities that more privileged people take for granted. Hunger also deprives children of much more than just food. This deprives them of the opportunity to become strong enough to take care of themselves, get an education, take care of their family and enjoy their lives. A child without food has little chance of truly living his life.

What happens when a child is at risk of starvation?

When a child is born into this world with little or no access to food, it makes a huge difference to that child. If they are born in sub-Saharan Africa, it is likely that they will die before they are five years old. Even with access to food, they may not be getting enough of the nutrients they need to maintain a healthy body. This results in stunted growth, cognitive and behavioral problems, lack of energy for basic tasks, and an inability to fully learn.

Facts about childhood hunger

Children suffering from hunger experience up to 160 days of illness each year (Glicken, MD, 2010)
Malnutrition exacerbates the effects of diseases including measles, malaria, severe diarrhea and pneumonia (Black, Morris, & Bryce, 2003; Bryce et al. , 2005).
Vitamin A is one of the most common deficiencies in children in low-income countries. This increases their chances of developing infectious diseases (UNICEF, 2018b).
Zinc deficiency is a leading cause of diarrhea, the leading cause of death in children under five years of age (UNICEF, 2018b).
40% of children under five in developing countries are anemic and half are iron deficient (UNICEF, 2018b).
66 million primary school children go to school hungry in developing countries. 23 million of these children live in Africa (World Food Program [WFP], 2012).
In the US, 25% of children in families at risk of starvation may be forced to rely on hunger relief charities.

Does a child die of hunger every 10 seconds?

You may have seen this statement by some of the charities in their awareness campaigns over the past few years. The 10 second figure comes from the authoritative source, The Lancet, who completed a study that found that more than 3 million children starved to death in 2011. Campaigners divided the number of seconds in a year by three million to achieve their goal. Therefore, it is likely that a child dies about every 10 seconds of starvation across the globe.

How does child hunger affect learning?

Children living in famine in developing countries have few opportunities to go to school. Even if they have access to school without food, their learning and development is limited. Malnutrition affects a child's growth, stalls their body, hinders their abilities, and leads to neurological and cognitive behavioral problems as they get older. Children who suffer from hunger cannot learn effectively and are at a disadvantage. Food feeds our brain, and our brain allows us to learn and grow. Without proper nutrition, education and a child's ability to learn are extremely limited.

How does food insecurity affect students?

Food insecurity is a problem not only in developing countries but also in developed countries. In the US, for example, about 50 million people across the country suffer from food insecurity. These people are most often families with children. In April 2016, one in six US households reported being unable to provide themselves with food. Food insecurity can negatively affect a child's education due to: