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The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says one in four children worldwide live in severe food poverty.

In the 2024 Child Food Poverty Program reportAccording to the global organization, this implies that affected children – a total of 181 million children under the age of five – survive on one or two food groups per day, and on some days even less.

UNICEF defines child food poverty as the inability of children to access and consume a nutritious and varied diet in early childhood.

“The scale of these hardships is alarming, and the overall slow progress in addressing this crisis hides deep inequalities at both the global and regional levels,” reads the report, which was published in June.

The report states that while severe child food poverty affects all regions of the world, twenty countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are home to more than two-thirds of children living in severe child food poverty.

The countries are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, China, Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Somalia, South Africa, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania and Yemen.

Of a total of 63 countries surveyed in the report, Nigeria ranked 32nd and fell into the “high” category of countries with severe child food poverty – faring worse than Ghana, Togo, Mali and Ivory Coast.

FACTORS CAUSING FOOD POVERTY FOR CHILDREN

The report identified rising inequality, conflict and climate crises, combined with rising food prices, the abundance of unhealthy food, harmful food marketing strategies and poor child feeding practices, as some of the factors condemning millions of children to child food poverty.

While parents and families have a responsibility to feed their children, the report states that “severe child food poverty is the result of systems that fail, not families that fail.”

“Feeding young children is not just about filling stomachs,” the report reads.

“But the forces that lead to severe food poverty among children – poor food environments, poor nutrition practices and poverty in household income – are beyond their complete control.

“These forces persist because food, health care and social protection systems fail to improve physical and financial access to affordable, nutritious and varied foods and fail to equip parents and families with the knowledge, skills and support they need to provide these foods to their children. children.”

In the foreword to the report, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said ending child food poverty is a policy choice and the solutions are “well known.”

UNICEF said part of the solutions involves “positioning the elimination of child food poverty as a policy imperative and reducing child food poverty as a measure of success in achieving global and national nutrition and development goals, with time-bound targets and results in relevant sectoral and multisectoral plans”.