Undernourished and Overlooked
A Global Nutrition Crisis in Adolescent Girls and Women
Highlights
The current food and nutrition crisis is driving up acute malnutrition amongst pregnant and breastfeeding women in the worst affected countries. This alarming increase is happening as the converging impact of poverty, conflict, and climate change continues to deepen the nutrition crisis amongst adolescent girls and women.
UNICEF’s new report: Undernourished and Overlooked: A Global Nutrition Crisis in Adolescent Girls and Women warns that more than a billion adolescent girls and women suffer from undernutrition (underweight and short height), micronutrient deficiencies, and anaemia.
The report calls for urgent investments in essential nutrition programmes for adolescent girls and women to address malnutrition in mothers and babies as new finding shows half of the global burden of stunting in early childhood develops during the 500-day window between pregnancy and a child’s first six months of life, the period when young children are entirely dependent on their mother for nutrition.
