Education

Intro

• Good nutrition, especially during a child’s critical first 1,000 days from pregnancy to age two, helps develop strong brains and bodies.
• Well-nourished children are given the best conditions to thrive, develop their full potential to learn and do well in school. Stunting before the age of 2 predicts poorer cognitive development, impacting the whole life span. Children malnourished in the first 8,000 days can lose ten to fifteen IQ points⁹.
• Education interventions can keep children in vulnerability in school - especially girls - and reduce teen pregnancy and break the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition.
• There is a major mismatch between investments in the health of children, currently almost all focused on children under 5 years of age, and investment in education. Low and lower-middle income countries invest some US$210 billion annually in providing basic education for their children. By contrast, they invest at best 5.5 billion in ensuring that the same children have the health to allow them to learn.¹⁰
• Therefore, integrating nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive actions into education system programming is a cost-effective way¹¹ of concurrently improving education outcomes and reducing malnutrition.

Why

Why the sector needs to get involved

• Fostering an enabling learning environment: Children are better able to fully use their potential when benefitting from healthy diets.
• Addressing and preventing malnutrition via interventions in the education sector to implement nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive action reduces a major barrier to improved educational outcomes.
• Strudies¹² show that school health and nutrition interventions for poor girls and boys where worms and anaemia are prevalent could lead to 2.5 years of additional schooling.
• Investing in good nutrition in school communities enhances the health and wellbeing of the community, and helps to accelerate the realization of all SDGs.

Key asks

• Provide basic health and nutrition services at school, for example through school feeding programmes, distribution of micronutrient supplements, deworming, and nutrition education.
• Strengthen the nutrition workforce and boost the number of nutrition professionals, through incentivizing secondary education and vocational training for those undertaking nutrition-related career paths.
• Strongly integrate nutrition modules in the secondary education programmes for health and social sector professionals.
• Prioritize, invest in, and protect, girls’ education, which is crucial to an improved nutrition legacy.