Today, the world faces more challenges than at any time in my adult life: inflation, debt, new wars. Unfortunately, aid is not keeping pace with these needs, especially in the places where it is needed most.
For example, more than half of all child deaths still occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2010, the percentage of the world's poor living in the region has also increased by more than 20 percent. Yet, during the same period, the share of total foreign aid going to Africa has fallen from nearly 40% to just 25% – the lowest percentage in 20 years. Fewer resources mean more children will die from preventable causes.
The global health boom is over. But for how long?
This is the question I've been grappling with for the past five years: Will we look back on this period as the end of a golden age? Or is it just a brief interlude before another boom in global health?
I'm still optimistic. I think we can give global health a second chance — even in a world where governments have to increase their budgets to meet the challenges.
To do this, we will need a two-pronged approach. First, the world must recommit to the work that drove progress in the early 2000s, particularly investments in crucial vaccines and medicines. They are still saving millions of lives each year, and we cannot afford to backslide.
But we also have to look further. The R&D pipeline is full of powerful and surprisingly cost-effective new breakthroughs. Now we just need to put them to work fighting the world's most widespread health crises. And that starts with good nutrition.
Sometimes someone asks me what I would do if I had a magic wand. For years I have always given the same answer: I would solve the problem of malnutrition.
This summer, UNICEF released its first report on child food poverty. The findings were shocking. Two-thirds of the world’s children – more than 400 million children – are not getting enough nutrients to grow and thrive, putting them at high risk of malnutrition. In 2023, WHO estimates that 148 million children will experience stunting, and 45 million will experience wasted growth – the most severe form of chronic and acute malnutrition. This prevents them from growing to their full potential – and, in the worst cases, from growing at all at all.
When a child dies, in half the cases the underlying cause is malnutrition.
And now a significant headwind is making it harder to solve malnutrition: climate change. We teamed up with our partners at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to understand just how difficult that headwind is:
Between 2024 and 2050, climate change will cause 40 million additional children to be stunted, and 28 million additional children to be wasted.
This is an important estimate, and it will inform where the country's leaders spend their aid money to address current trends and the growing burden of malnutrition.
Obviously, fighting climate change is very important. But these figures show that in the poorest countries near the equator, the health crisis and the climate crisis are one and the same. In fact, the best way to fight the effects of climate change is to invest in nutrition.