58 posts categorized "Millennium Development Goals"

The new government of President Otto Perez Molina has initiated a program called “Hunger Zero” to combat chronic malnutrition in Guatemala.  Despite being a so-called Middle Income Country (a rung above the poorest countries, as measured by the size of the national economy), chronic malnutrition remains a persistent problem, with rates in certain areas as high as those in the poorest countries in Africa.

According to the head of the Food and Nutritional Security Secretariat (SESAN), Luis Enrique Monterroso, the project will begin in the hardest-hit municipalities and then expand to all 166 municipalities affected significantly by hunger. Included in the Hunger Zero program are nutrition interventions focused on the 1,000 Days "window of opportunity," from pregnancy until a child's second birthday. The government has also created the Dignity Triangle program, which focuses on food availability, access, and nutrition education.

Bread for the World is a strong supporter of the 1,000 Days Partnership and the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement, which advocate for improved nutrition in pregnant women and children during this critical period. At this stage of life, the effects of malnutrition can cause irreversible damage to brain development, cognitive abilities, and resistance to diseases. Guatemala is also a supporter of these initiatives, which share key objectives with the new government’s anti-hunger programs.

The recently appointed head of SESAN happens to be a friend of Bread for the World! When Bread hosted the SUN Civil Society Working Group meeting that followed our 2011 National Gathering, Luis Enrique was there representing his country. His skills and commitment to ending hunger and malnutrition in Guatemala were evident to Otto Perez during his election campaign. He was asked to head this very important office, which is responsible for coordinating the efforts of 13 government ministries and reports directly to Guatemala's Vice President.

Todd Post, editor of Bread for the World Institute's Hunger Report, and I recently traveled to Guatemala and were able to meet with Luis Enrique in his new capacity. He is excited about the challenge before him and expressed his thanks for Bread for the World's support in giving him the opportunity to learn about SUN, which is just getting started in Guatemala.  He has already set an ambitious goal: reducing hunger by 10 percent within four years. He has also begun to work on Hunger Zero by identifying the 166 most malnourished of the country's 366 municipalities.

Guatemala is a country that faces many challenges – social, political, and economic. It is also a country that has correctly identified addressing the root causes of malnutrition as key to its future success.  Let’s follow the developments there and wish “our man in Guatemala” great success!

    Scott Bleggi is a senior international policy analyst with Bread for the World Institute.

Photo: Laura Sheahen / Catholic Relief Services 

The most important period in human development is the 1,000 days between pregnancy and age 2. Healthy development, particularly brain development, depends on getting enough nutritious food during this window.

Bread for the World is a key advocate for good nutrition during the 1,000 Days. From coordinating the Scaling Up Nutrition / 1,000 Days Civil Society Meeting with Concern Worldwide to launching Women of Faith for the 1,000 Days Movement, Bread is leading the movement to ensure that all children under age 2 have access to the right nutrients to live healthy, productive lives.

What exactly is this 1,000-day window of opportunity? This is how Bread for the World Institute explains it in the 2012 Hunger Report:

The U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) treat hunger and poverty as interdependent problems. The first MDG — dramatically reducing hunger and poverty — measures progress against hunger by gauging how many children remain chronically undernourished.

“Hunger” seems like a simpler concept than “undernutrition,” but it’s most accurate to say that it’s the effects of undernutrition that kill children or limit their potential for the rest of their lives.

Young children need calories to grow and gain weight, but vitamins and minerals matter every bit as much. In developing countries, one-third of all children are stunted or underweight as a result of undernutrition; it is the leading cause of child mortality. Reducing the high rate of undernutrition among children in the developing world is one of the greatest challenges in global health.

The most critical period in human development is the 1,000 days starting at pregnancy and lasting through a child’s second year. Healthy development, particularly brain development, depends on getting the right foods at this critical time. Hunger during this time is catastrophic, because the resulting physical and cognitive damage is lifelong and irreversible.

Early hunger and malnutrition is associated with later problems such as chronic illness and poor school attendance and learning. As adults, the survivors have lower productivity and lifetime incomes, which costs developing countries an estimated 2 to 3 percent of their economic output (Gross Domestic Product).

Until recently, international development programs did not focus much attention on improving the nutritional status of young children. But that has changed since 2008, when a series of reports on early childhood appeared in the leading medical journal The Lancet. The series emphasized the connection between nutrition during the critical 1,000-day window and development outcomes, and showed how practical, inexpensive interventions during this “window of opportunity” can dramatically alter the arc of a person’s life.

The Lancet series appeared at the height of a global hunger crisis driven by dramatic spikes in the prices of staple foods, which forced an additional 100 million people into hunger and led to rioting in a number of countries. In the aftermath, the United Nations formed a High-Level Task Force on Global Food Security. In addition, representatives of the governments and civil societies of dozens of countries came together to prepare a framework for nutrition action based on The Lancet reports. From this effort came the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement to support the action plan.

During a U.N. summit on the MDGs in September 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Irish counterpart launched the “1,000 Days: Change a Life, Change the Future” initiative. 1,000 Days and SUN seek to make nutrition an integral component of development programs. SUN’s plan for accomplishing this has been endorsed by national governments, multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and other international development banks, civil society organizations, development agencies, academics, and philanthropic bodies. During the U.N. event, David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, and Tom Arnold, CEO of Concern Worldwide, committed to convening a follow-up meeting of SUN. This meeting was held June 13, 2011, in Washington, DC, and drew government and civil society representatives from both SUN countries and developed countries. Bread for the World and Concern Worldwide continue to be instrumental in keeping policymakers focused on SUN and the critical importance of the 1,000-day window of opportunity between pregnancy and age 2.

₊Read more from the 2012 Hunger Report’s Chapter 4, Rebalancing Globally.

Kate Hagen is Hunger Report project assistant at Bread for the World Institute.

The deadline set for the Millennium Development Goals is 2015. So far, I haven’t heard a lot of discussion in the United States about what comes next. Do the MDGs need to be extended? How long—another 5, 10, or 15 years? Is it helpful to set global development goals at all? And if so, what kind of goals will be most effective in a post-2015 world?

Before long, these questions will start grabbing attention here in the United States—and the debate will be a lively one. Bread for the World Institute will be right in the midst of it. We’ll be hosting our own discussion here on Institute Notes and we invite others to join us.

In some parts of the world, the discussion is already underway. I have to give a lot of credit to the Overseas Development Institute in the U.K. for putting out some exciting material about a post-2015 MDG framework. Their timely work is hardly a surprise: the Overseas Development Institute is one of the premier U.K. think tanks on development issues, and the U.K. government considers the MDGs an important factor in deciding how and where it will provide foreign aid.

Recently I mentioned to a colleague who also works on development issues here in Washington, DC, that I’ve been thinking a lot about the MDGs, and his response was, “Aren’t the MDGs kind of passé?” I hadn’t realized that this idea is common. So let me highlight a few of the top reasons the MDGs aren’t passé. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but to colleagues who work on development issues in the United States—this is mostly for you.

The MDGs have clearly made a difference to development assistance. The last decade saw increases in development assistance and a refocusing on reducing poverty that one can’t help but attribute to the establishment of the MDGs. Maybe this is more correlation than cause—we’ll never know the counterfactual of what would have happened without the MDGs—but I believe we should take donors at their word. For example, in her confirmation hearing in January 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton identified “working aggressively to reach the Millennium Development Goals in health, education, and economic opportunity” as one of the Obama administration’s priorities in Africa.

The MDGs are often criticized because so many developing countries, particularly in Africa, are going to fall short of reaching them. This is frankly unfair, because the MDGs were never intended to apply to individual countries. These are global goals, and the world is responsible for meeting them. Judging the MDGs by whether the individual countries that started in the most difficult circumstances have met them only fuels the cynical view that development assistance doesn’t work.

And, in fact, African countries have made strong progress on development. The context matters. Say country A, with a child mortality rate of 250 per 1,000, cuts this rate to 200 per 1,000. Country B, beginning with a child mortality rate of 20 per 1,000, reduces its rate to 5 per 1,000. This means that the lives of 50 children were saved in country A for every 15 lives saved in country B. But country A is seen as a failure on the MDG indicator of cutting child mortality in half, while country B is considered a success because of its 75 percent reduction.

What no one considers is the reason there was such a gap between the two rates of child mortality to start with: the health system in country A was much weaker than in country B. Development will simply take more time in country A, because development is about building systems that can sustain progress.

I’ll be writing lots more about the MDGs in the months ahead. Hope to hear from you.

View or order the 2012 Hunger Report at www.bread.org/hungerreport.

Todd Post is senior editor with Bread for the World Institute.

The new Director-General of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, stated in a press conference that “the total elimination of hunger and undernourishment from the world” will be his top priority. He said the FAO would immediately begin scaling up its programs in food deficit countries where undernutrition persists.

 
Photo Credit: United Nations

Graziano da Silva, whose term as leader of the FAO will last up to four years, said that a global commitment will be required. No single agency, government, or organization working alone can win the “battle” to end hunger. He promised transparent policies and pledged to work closely with other U.N. agencies, member countries, the private sector, civil society organizations, and other stakeholders. Da Silva, a Brazilian, was a leader in his country’s successful campaign to reduce hunger and malnutrition.

Ending hunger is the first of five FAO strategic priorities. The others include moving towards more sustainable systems of food production and consumption; achieving greater fairness in the global management of food; completing FAO's reform and decentralization; and expanding South-South partnerships (among countries south of the equator, where most developing economies are found) and other forms of cooperation.

Da Silva said the FAO will strive to be more effective and responsive by administrative cost-cutting and improvements in efficiency. Neither of these measures will cut into FAO's technical work or its direct assistance to partner countries.

The new Director-General concluded the press conference by saying, "I am convinced that the [FAO] can make a significant and growing contribution to food security and sustainable food production and consumption in the world."

Scott Bleggi is the senior international policy analyst in Bread for the World Institute.

Photo by Paul Alberghine, USDA/FAS

The USDA announced that it is investing $8.5 million in six organizations to research, produce, and field-test new or improved micronutrient-fortified food aid products in six countries: Cambodia, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Mozambique and Tanzania. The awards were made on the basis of proposals submitted under the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education Program.

The new products being developed are designed to meet the energy and nutrition needs of women, infants, and school-age children. Through this effort, USDA will identify products that can be programmed on a larger scale to address specific nutritional deficiencies among these groups. The McGovern-Dole Program helps low-income, food-deficit countries that are committed to universal education. It provides food donations, financial and technical assistance for school feeding, and maternal and child nutrition projects.

The awards were made under the Micronutrient-Fortified Food Aid Pilot Program. One previous award was made in 2010 for a company to test its ready-to-use, fortified dairy protein paste in a population of 4,000. The new or improved products include fortified rice, a lipid-based nutrient spread, a poultry-based fortified spread, a soy-fortified pudding, and a sorghum-cowpea fortified blended food.

This last product will be developed by Kansas State University, which is also developing other blended fortified food aid products recommended in Tufts University’s Food Aid Quality Review, prepared for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Among these are Corn Soy Blend 14 (CSB-14), which includes a component of whey protein, and Sorghum Soy Blend. The cowpea fortified food product is especially promising, since cowpeas are grown throughout Africa and if local products can be used, food aid program costs will be greatly reduced.

The United States is showing strong leadership in Maternal and Child Nutrition issues through its research and development efforts in these products. Food for Education complements the 1,000 Days partnership and the global Scaling Up Nutrition movement, which support nutrition early in life -- when it makes the most significant improvements in cognition, growth, and lifelong health.

Scott Bleggi is a senior international policy analyst with Bread for the World Institute.

Two successive droughts in the Horn of Africa have left both farmers and pastoralists unable to produce food for their families. Photo United Nations/Albert Gonzalez Farran.

Durban, South Africa, is currently hosting 30,000 delegates from all over the world, gathered for 12 days of talks organized under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In one sense, of course, climate change affects everyone since we all live on this planet. But in another sense, it is poor people in developing countries who are suffering most of its effects -- even though they contribute the least to the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change.

As Dr. Kumi Naidoo, international  executive director of Greenpeace, said at the Durban conference, “We are living in a global state of environmental apartheid. Separated along the lines of rich and poor, the rich consume as they please and the poor suffer from their consumption.”

"Environmental apartheid." Dr. Naidoo was for years a leading anti-apartheid activist in his native South Africa -- this is not a comparison he would make lightly.

This year, the most severe hunger emergency in the world is in the Horn of Africa, where 13 million people are at risk and it is believed that at least 50,000 children younger than 5 have already died. The worst suffering is concentrated in Somalia and among Somali refugees who have reached Kenya or Ethiopia.

Is climate change to blame? Oxfam International examined this question in detail in its briefing paper Horn of Africa Drought: Climate Change and Future Impacts on Food Security. The short answer, in the words of the U.K. government's chief scientific adviser, is that "such events [the more frequent and more severe droughts in the Horn] have a higher probability of occurring as a result of climate change."

Oxfam, Bread for the World, and others emphasize that drought does not have to lead to famine. A host of factors collided to produce famine in Somalia -- including  drought, crop failure, widespread deaths among herd animals, continuous conflict, government neglect, deep poverty, lack of transportation infrastructure, and inequality. Other parts of the Horn also experienced the droughts and significant increases in hunger, but nowhere else did droughts lead to full-fledged famine.

It goes without saying that prompt measures to prevent further climate change must be implemented -- easier said than done, as the delegates in Durban must know. Another, even more urgent, part of the global response must be to reduce the vulnerability of poor people in poor countries who are bearing the brunt of the current phase of climate change -- the part that can no longer be prevented.

As the Institute's recently released 2012 Hunger Report points out in a section called “Sustainable, Productive Agriculture amid Climate Change," data from West Africa shows that children born in drought years are far more likely to be malnourished. Using data such as this, analysts calculate that if current trends continue,  climate change could increase child malnutrition by  20 percent by 2050.  Other recent Hunger Reports also offer insight into the connection between climate change and hunger -- and what can be done to break that connection. 

+The 2012 Hunger Report is available at www.hungerreport.org

Michele Learner is associate editor for Bread for the World Institute.

Good nutrition now will help him, and his community, for the rest of his life.Photo byLaura Elizabeth Pohl for Bread for the World.

Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed a large international gathering of development practitioners attending the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. The participants range from donors — new and old — to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), developing country governments, and civil society groups. The fact that Clinton is the first Secretary of State to participate in such a meeting speaks volumes about the priority accorded global development at the highest levels of the administration and about the commitment to improving the quality of U.S. development assistance. More effective development assistance is a goal in particular of two signature initiatives, Feed the Future and the Global Health Initiative.

Secretary Clinton first announced that she would attend the Busan meeting in September, when she spoke at the one-year anniversary event of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, held during the High Level Meeting on Nutrition of the U.N. General Assembly. SUN, Clinton said, embodies the principles of aid effectiveness:

“This program has become, in a very short time, a model of how to implement successfully the principles that the international community affirmed at the High-Level Forums for Aid Effectiveness in Paris and Accra. Together, this community of countries, international organizations, NGOs, civil society groups, and private sector companies has already achieved meaningful benchmarks in the fight to strengthen global nutrition. From Tanzania, which has created a nutrition-specific line in its national budget and posted nutritionists in every district nationwide, [to] countries such as Guatemala, Uganda, Peru, Mozambique, and Burkina Faso, which have introduced new measures to improve financial accountability and strengthen their country’s commitment to nutrition, we are seeing the kinds of high-level reforms and political leadership needed to reach people on a broad scale.

"Now, this is an accomplishment not only for those whose lives are being saved and improved, but also for the people like us in this room who believe passionately in the critical role that nutrition must play in order to produce thriving children, families, and communities. And I think it’s also an indicator of our better understanding of what works in development and what it takes to make progress together, because through the SUN movement, we are seeing better results with country-owned leadership. When programs are coordinated and evidence-based, we get better outcomes. When results are measured transparently and are used to improve strategies, and when all parties are held accountable for delivering on their promises, we actually can see the progress being made.”

The SUN Movement is a different way of working. It is not housed in any institution or owned by any constituency. As Secretary Clinton’s remarks highlight, it is a collaborative effort with a common goal, supporting country-led and country-driven efforts. In just one year, 22 countries have expressed their intention to scale up nutrition—surpassing all expectations and underscoring the urgency of tackling undernutrition at the most effective time, during the 1,000-day window between pregnancy and age 2. Each country has developed national nutrition strategies and implementation plans.

Moving forward into the implementation phase, it is critical to continue this way of working together and to ensure that SUN countries can rely on support—both financial and technical—from the international community. This is important for the sustainability of maternal and child nutrition interventions and investments, and for building capacity for the long term. The U.S. government is supporting SUN through Feed the Future and the Global Health Initiative. Food aid should also be seen as an essential component of U.S. efforts to improve global maternal and child nutrition, as Bread for the World Institute points out in our just-released 2012 Hunger Report.

+The 2012 Hunger Report is available at www.hungerreport.org

       Asma Lateef is director of Bread for the World Institute.        

Today, November 29, 2011, the seaside city of Busan, South Korea, is hosting the first day of the fourth high-level forum on aid effectiveness. At least 2,000 delegates will participate in three days of key discussions that will impact the future of development in significant ways.

Photo Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

In 2005, through the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, the international community embraced an ambitious set of commitments to improve the impact of development assistance. Today in Busan, we are taking stock of the progress made so far. To what extent have these commitments been implemented? Is aid being delivered in a more effective way?

Bread for the World Institute's latest briefing paper, Making Aid Work Better, makes a set of key recommendations to the U.S. government on improving the effectiveness of aid so that aid contributes to real development outcomes:

• Continue to elevate and maintain development as a national priority, in the face of a range of competing international and domestic agendas – to ensure that development aid is more predictable for the medium-term (the next three to five years), and that allocation decisions favor efficiency and reduce fragmentation.
• Make a push for a revitalized global effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and focus on the need for global public goods. Recognize that the world’s poorest and most fragile states need security and capacity, and that working with them means being willing to adapt “business as usual” and take risks.
• Lead the efforts to accelerate poverty reduction and growth in developing countries by encouraging the international community to fund capacity-building within countries. Inadequate technical capacities at the country level and donors’ unwillingness to use existing country systems has made it more challenging to make progress on implementing the existing commitments on aid effectiveness.
• Support a broad partnership that includes emerging economies as well as private actors and nongovernmental organizations, and is based on clear and transparent communication.
• Continue to push for a focus on development outcomes and measurable results that are reported in ways readily accessible to the public.

 +The 2012 Hunger Report is available at www.hungerreport.org.

Faustine Wabwire is a foreign assistance policy analyst with Bread for the World Institute.

Rebalancing Act: Updating U.S. Food and Farm Policies, the 2012 edition of Bread for the World Institute's annual Hunger Report, was released today, November 21. This is the Institute's 22^nd annual report. Few of them have been as timely, considering the looming budget cuts Congress is negotiating.

The report argues that U.S. farm policies need to shift toward production of healthy foods. We say bluntly that current farm policies are doing a poor job of contributing to a healthy food system. There is too much support for ingredients used to produce cheap junk foods, and not enough support for foods that promote good health.

The greater share of government support to the farm sector goes to the biggest producers. Smaller producers and producers of healthy foods — i.e., fruits and vegetables — get little or no support. It's been this way for decades, but Americans are expressing more concern than ever about what we're eating and what we're getting for our tax dollars to the farm sector. The local food movement, with its emphasis on "smaller is better," is helping to reshape the farm policy debate. Farm policies are not solely to blame for Americans' low consumption of fruits and vegetables — but U.S. farms don't even produce enough healthy foods for our population to get its recommended daily allowances of vitamins and minerals. We need to ask, what are farm policies really trying to accomplish?

The report is not a diatribe against large-scale farming. We recognize the value of production agriculture in lowering food costs. The biggest beneficiaries of low food prices are low-income people – the people most vulnerable to hunger, who are therefore Bread for the World's main concern. Food production could also be a key component of the country's economic recovery strategy, a potential source of jobs. In tough times with so many people out of work, the hobbling U.S. economy simply can't afford to ignore these possibilities. 

The greatest economic challenge facing the United States, bar none, is the rising cost of health care. Obesity as a contributor to these costs is getting more attention as the problem affects more and more Americans. Hunger, on the other hand, is often overlooked as a health issue—but hungry people are by definition in poor health. Together, the costs of obesity and hunger run into the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This calls for a much stronger tie between the foods government encourages farmers to produce and the foods government should be encouraging people to eat.

Much of the report is focused on nutrition programs, which should be serving more healthy foods to more than 30 million children (two-thirds of them low-income) who eat school lunch as well as offering incentives for the nation's 45 million SNAP (formerly food stamps) participants to purchase more fruits and vegetables. Farms are, after all, businesses that respond to consumer demand. With some help from government policies, people who would eat healthier if they could afford to could provide farmers with a much larger market to supply.

There are plenty of large-scale fruit and vegetable farmers, but the report doesn't argue that government should transfer to them the support that now goes to large corn and soy farmers. What large-scale fruit and vegetable farmers need is rational U.S. immigration policies. Most of the people who pick the fruits and vegetables we eat are unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and Central America. This is low-paying, backbreaking work that few Americans show an interest in doing. The report looks at the situation of farm workers, emphasizing how much of the food we eat—and should be eating more of—depends on a steady flow of immigrant labor. That labor pool is at risk of vanishing if the federal government doesn't intervene to halt the trend toward repressive state-level immigration policies.

Finally, the report discusses U.S. food and farm policies that affect emergency food aid and agricultural development assistance overseas. Again, the focus is largely on nutrition, particularly for vulnerable groups such as young children and pregnant and nursing women. Good nutrition during the "1,000 Days" period between pregnancy and age 2 is critical to a person's lifelong health and ability to learn. This reality has gotten much more attention in the past few years, as have the simple, cost-effective nutrition actions that can make all the difference – things like promoting exclusive breastfeeding for six months and providing fortified food aid to young survivors of humanitarian disasters. Supporting women's agricultural work is another essential component.

Normally, changes in food and farm policy are made incrementally. Given everything that is going on, though, we need bolder, more determined thinking about how policies can better meet the needs that the world is now facing. The 2012 Hunger Report has plenty of ideas to move us in the right direction.

 +View or order the 2012 Hunger Report at www.bread.org/hungerreport.

Todd Post is senior editor with Bread for the World Institute.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is poised to sign a five-year Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) compact with Indonesia—the first such compact to include a nutrition component, “Community-Based Nutrition to Reduce Stunting.”

More than 35 percent of Indonesia’s babies and toddlers under age 2 are stunted, meaning they have a highly visible sign of malnutrition--being significantly shorter than average children of their age. There is growing global attention to this age group, often called the 1,000 day window between pregnancy and age 2, because the consequences of malnutrition for such young children are death for some and lifelong, largely irreversible damage to the health and development of those who survive. A higher risk of death in infancy and early childhood, increased susceptibility to infection and illness, and impaired cognitive abilities caused by early nutritional deficiencies have been well documented in a growing body of scientific evidence, dating to 2006 with the Copenhagen Consensus and followed by studies done by the World Bank and by a series of studies by the respected medical journal The Lancet. Research has also found that survivors of early childhood malnutrition complete fewer years of school and are less productive on the job, which causes countries long-term economic loss.

 
Photo credit:  USAID

The 1,000 Days Partnership, on which Bread has reported previously, champions new investments and partnerships to improve nutrition during this critical period.  Indonesia recognized that taking action against malnutrition during the 1,000-day window must be a top national priority. Its five-year national development plan called for a program of prevention.

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, with more than 140 million people living on less than $2 a day. The country’s high prevalence of stunting is a legacy of a health service delivery system that lacks capacity at the local level. The Community-Based Nutrition to Reduce Stunting project will work with communities and health systems to “strengthen the demand for and supply of appropriate services to reduce chronic malnutrition among children.” Designed with the participation of local governments, civil society, and the private sector, it will build on an existing program that involves communities in taking action to improve targeted health, education, and nutrition indicators.  Stunting will be reduced by strengthening community engagement, nutrition and sanitation services delivery, and national awareness and advocacy. The project proposes to reach 1.4 million beneficiaries in rural Indonesia.

The MCC administers Millennium Challenge Account funding. Back in 2002, Bread members were instrumental in persuading Congress to establish the program, which makes multi-year grants to promote inclusive economic growth that reduces poverty. To qualify for MCC funds, countries must be low-income or lower-middle-income (meaning that their per capita incomes are less than about $4,000 a year), and they must satisfy set criteria such as investing in the well-being of their people and fighting corruption.

Bread for the World Institute has long been a champion of increased focus on improving maternal and child nutrition. In our 2009 briefing paper, New Hope for Malnourished Mothers and Children, the Institute noted that the Millennium Challenge Corporation was under-investing in nutrition—especially given the importance of nutrition to economic growth. We are encouraged by Indonesia’s plan for this compact and applaud MCC for taking this important step forward.  We look for additional countries to improve nutrition outcomes, especially in pregnant women and children.

 
  Scott Bleggi is a senior international policy analyst with Bread for the World Institute.