May 13, 2019
Jef Leroy, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI
Anyone following international development is probably familiar with “stunting”—which in nontechnical terms means children being too short for their age. Over the past decade, as the world has focused unprecedented attention on undernutrition, stunting has taken center stage.
This spotlight on stunting has done considerable good. Notably, it has helped nutrition advocates to communicate the consequences of undernutrition to policymakers and donors and persuade them to support the fight against these challenges.
But the focus on stunting has also caused confusion, and this confusion risks preventing us from helping billions of people get the nutrition they need to live better lives. There is a general misperception today that addressing stunting—and its close cousin, linear growth retardation—will automatically address a host of development issues linked to nutrition. In many cases, however, stunting is not the problem we need to solve—it’s something that tells us there is a problem that needs solving.
Nonetheless, many nutrition programs in the developing world have made eliminating stunting their primary objective and are evaluating success based on whether rates of stunting go down. Limited impact on stunting is often seen as program failure, which unnecessarily discounts other benefits that nutrition and health programs bring to children in disadvantaged communities, such as better breastfeeding practices, improved diets, and reductions in illness.
Stunting is commonly believed to cause serious problems, including delayed child development, reduced productivity and earnings in adulthood, higher incidence of chronic diseases including obesity or cardiovascular problems, difficult childbirth, and poor birth outcomes such as low birthweight.
But our careful review of the available evidence shows this isn’t the case. And this subtle misinterpretation could harm the global nutrition agenda.
Read the full piece in the original posting on Devex and watch the video below for more on how stunting can best be used to improve global nutrition.
Jef Leroy is a Senior Research Fellow with IFPRI's Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division. Edward Frongillo, Director at the Global Health Initiatives at the University of South Carolina, contributed to this article. Drew Sample, IFPRI Manager for Media Engagement, and Tracy Brown, IFPRI Senior Editor, prepared the text of this post.
