Key Messages:

Why 1,000 days? Why nutrition?

• Research has consistently shown that the first 1,000 days of life is a fleeting, critical window when nutrition for both mothers and babies has an outsized impact.
• These critical 1,000 days lay the foundation for all the days that follow. How mothers and children are nourished and cared for during this time profoundly impacts a child’s physical growth, cognitive development, and lifelong health.
• Children who receive proper nutrition in the first 1,000 days: have a higher likelihood of birthing at a healthy weight; have a reduced risk of developing a number of illnesses and disorders, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes; become better learners with fewer behavioral issues in kindergarten; and benefit from better health and financial stability.
• Ensuring children have access to good nutrition when it matters most is one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to create brighter, healthier futures. Leading economists consistently rank nutrition interventions among the most cost-effective ways to save and improve lives around the world.
• Not only are nutrition interventions relatively inexpensive to implement, they also have an extremely high return on investment (ROI), with every $1 invested yielding up to $35 in economic returns.
• Mothers, babies, and families can thrive with targeted support, including prenatal vitamins, breastfeeding support, vitamin A supplementation, and supplemental foods.

A global problem

• Despite being entirely preventable, nearly 1 in 4 children under 5 around the world have had their growth permanently stunted by malnutrition – that’s 148 million kids.
• Global food insecurity remains far worse than it was in 2019, with up to 750 million experiencing hunger in 2023 – one out of 11 people in the world.
• Women are most likely to bear the brunt of food insecurity. Not only are women more susceptible to micronutrient deficiencies, but women and girls are more likely to reduce their food intake and eat last and least in their households.
• Rising food costs are preventing families from being able to feed their families: more than one-third of people in the world – about 2.8 billion – could not afford a healthy diet in 2022.
• Malnutrition is the greatest threat to child survival worldwide, making children more susceptible to deadly infectious diseases such as pneumonia, AIDS, and malaria, and lifelong illness and impairment from stunting and wasting.
• Malnutrition robs countries of human capital, the foundation of economic development and resilience. Malnutrition costs the world $3.5 trillion in lost productivity and healthcare costs each year. The human potential lost to malnutrition costs low-income nations up to 16% of their GDP in forgone productivity, which amounts to a permanent 2008-level global recession every year.
• Investments to scale up high-impact nutrition interventions could avert 6.2 million deaths in children under age five and nearly a million stillbirths over the next decade. Such programs would also avert 27 million cases of child stunting and 144 million cases of maternal anemia. These investments would generate enormous economic benefits, far outweighing the costs of inaction, which run at around $41 trillion over 10 years.
• A global effort is essential now to renew financial commitments, explore new funding avenues, and drive nutrition-positive investments—with the ultimate goal of enhancing health, human capital, economic growth, and sustainability.

The Power 4

• Solutions exist – they need only be scaled.
• There are four essential actions the world can take now to prevent children from dying of the most severe forms of malnutrition. These interventions span the course of the critical 1,000-day period between the start of a woman’s pregnancy and a child’s second birthday when there is a unique window of opportunity to build healthier and more prosperous futures for mothers and their babies.
• The Power 4 nutrition interventions are: supplying all pregnant women with prenatal vitamins; supporting breastfeeding mothers; continuing large-scale Vitamin A Supplementation; and expanding coverage of specialized foods (RUTF) for treatment.
• During pregnancy, women need up to 50% more micronutrients – vitamins and minerals – to support the physiological changes in their bodies and meet the nutritional needs of their growing babies. Meeting this increased intake requirement solely from diet is challenging. Adding to the challenge is the fact that many women, especially in low- and middle-income countries, are already deficient in several micronutrients even before pregnancy: globally, two in three women of reproductive age suffer from at least one micronutrient deficiency.
• Micronutrient deficiencies during pregnancy put both mothers and babies at risk of birth complications, small vulnerable newborns, and even death, and the lack of nutrients in this critical period can prevent children from reaching their full physical and mental potential.
• Breastfeeding lays the foundation for moms, babies and families to survive and thrive. Even though breastfeeding is the best way to protect newborns from malnutrition and disease, only 1 in 2 babies around the world are exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months of their lives.
• Many mothers who would like to breastfeed cannot access the support and counseling they need to be successful. Women need support from all levels - health care professionals, the workplace, their communities and beyond - to meet their breastfeeding goals. Protecting breastfeeding is one of the best investments for saving lives and improving the health, social and economic development of individuals and nations.
• Vitamin A deficiency is the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness and increases the risk of death from common childhood illnesses such as diarrhea. Supplying a child with two high doses of vitamin A every year is one of the most cost-effective ways to protect children from blindness, diarrhea, and other fatal illnesses, reducing a child’s overall risk of death by up to 24%.
• After years of increasing, the proportion of children who have access to vitamin A coverage has started to drop alarmingly – in 2022, only 59 per cent of targeted children were reached. National Vitamin A supplementation efforts need to be transitioned to a sustainable delivery platform is essential to ensuring children continue to receive this critical preventive regimen.
• Wasting is a severe form of malnutrition that occurs when a child becomes dangerously thin. Wasting is the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition. Currently, 45 million children are affected by wasting across the globe each year, undermining the growth and development of children and increasing their risk of death by 12 times.
• Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) is an energy-dense, cost-effective, life-saving product that gives wasted children the nutrients they need to survive. The cost to treat a child with RUTF is about US$100 and requires around 10-15 kilos of RUTF over a six to eight-week period.
• While coverage of wasting treatment has increased over the last 15 years, access is still low: only a third of children with severe wasting are reached with the timely treatment and care they need to survive. Expanding coverage of services will help ensure no child dies because they don’t have access to the fundamental treatment they need to stay alive.

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