Ginger Without Borders

For the past few months I have been working at an ‘international development consulting agency’ (which will require a whole different blog post to explain what that means) called Humanitas Global.

Essentially how the company works is other projects approach the agency to have it manage their programs – which has translated to me spending the past few months working on a campaign called ‘No Wasted Lives‘. Ultimately the goal of the campaign is to “amplify evidence and existing efforts, inspire policy, programme and investment commitments, mobilise new partnerships and drive an unprecedented global movement to achieve the end of acute malnutrition.” (And for those of you who noticed, yes there are some words spelled differently than how they are spelled in the USA. Those words are not spelled wrong. Americans just spell things differently than the Brits, and No Wasted Lives uses the British spellings, not the American ones.)

But what does that mean? Totally valid question. Also the question I have spent the past two months figuring out. Because, to be honest, I never really imagined myself working in Public Health during my university days, so I never bothered to learn about it. Until life put this job in my lap and taught me a lot about ‘Acute Malnutrition’.

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Here are the basics:

• ‘Malnutrition’ means a deficiency, excess or imbalance in one’s intake of energy and/or nutritions.
  • This means it isn’t just eating too little (undernutrition), but also eating too much (overweight/obesity).

• ‘Undernutrition’ is split into multiple categories, namely:
  
  • Acute Malnutrition (low weight for height),
    
  • Chronic Malnutrition (low height for age),
    
  • Underweight (low weight for age),
  • Micronutrient Deficiencies (lacking vital vitamins or minerals; believe it or not, in 2012 Save the Children estimated that 10% of all children’s deaths, or 1/3 of all children’s deaths due to malnutrition, was caused by a micronutrient deficiency).

• Acute Malnutrition and Chronic Malnutrition have two other names: ‘Wasting’ and ‘Stunting’ respectively. However, neither of these names are actually the condition. Instead, they are the consequence of suffering from the condition – if you have either form of malnutrition during a vital period of your life (before age 2 for stunting, before age 5 for wasting), then you are labeled ‘stunted’ or ‘wasted’ (get it, No Wasted Lives? Right?).

• If you aren’t already confused enough, ‘Acute Malnutrition’ is separated further into ‘Severe Acute Malnutrition’ (SAM) or ‘Moderate Acute Malnutrition’ (MAM). Yes. Welcome to my world. And why it took two months to really understand this all.

• If a child has the misfortune of becoming ‘stunted’, the effects are often irreversible. These include impaired brain development, lower IQ, weakened immune systems, and greater risk of serious diseases like diabetes and cancer later in life. And the cycle will repeat itself – girls who become stunted as children often give birth to malnourished children who become stunted as well.

• To add to the stunting struggle, economists estimate that stunting can reduce a country’s GDP by as much as 12%.

• Wasting, on the other hand, can be reversed – hence the ‘severe’ vs. ‘moderate’. SAM versus MAM. Even so, children who suffer from SAM are 9 to 12 times more likely to die than their healthy counterparts (the number changes depending on who you quote). While the deaths are directly caused by the malnutrition, they can also be caused by illnesses which the children are too weak to survive.

• Probably because one can be reversed but the other can’t, and one causes significant clearly-defined economic woes but the other does not, there is a disproportionate amount of energy spent on stunting vs. wasting. And honestly I haven’t seen much work on micronutrient deficiencies (but I really haven’t been looking hard). Which is also why No Wasted Lives is working so diligently to increase the debate, research, and investment into wasting. It comes down to a very basic tenant: if children are dying from lacking treatment for this disease, there should be a focus put on preventing and treating it. Full stop.

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So what exactly do I do? Another fun question – a little bit of everything. Partially twitter. (Actually, a lot of twitter. And may I just say, twitter is a very fickle, peculiar beast.) Partially blogging. Partially LinkedIn. Partially research. A decent amount of civil society outreach (shout out to my post explaining what civil society organizations are). Basically just anything they need from me. And a lot of twitter. 😐

P.S. Dad – now you and mom have something to show people when you are attempting to explain what I do. So you’ll stop getting it wrong. 🙄