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That’s 165 million children whose bodies and minds are stunted by chronic nutritional deficiencies.

Learn more about stunting, and how we’re helping communities prevent it by clicking here.

UNICEF: U.S. kids worse off than many of their Western counterparts

American children are on average worse off than children in Western Europe and barely better off than their counterparts in the Baltic states and the former Yugoslavia, according to a recent report from United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on the welfare of children in developed countries.

The report, which compares kids in 29 Western countries, measures well-being across five metrics: material well-being, health and safety, behaviors and risks, housing and environment, as well as education. It ranks the United States in the bottom third on all five measures of well-being and particularly low on education and poverty. The United States is joined at the bottom by “emerging” European economies, while the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands come out on top. The report notes that this latter group of countries tends to spend far more per capita on social welfare programs.

The countries with the best reported child well-being tend to invest in strong social safety nets. Norway, Iceland and Sweden sink nearly 7 percent of their GDP, according to an OECD report, into education. Countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which until the ‘90s had GDPs per capita of less than $5,000, have been able to put less money into such services. Though U.S. GDP per capita was more than $48,000 in 2012, that money is not spread evenly cross the unusually large U.S. population.

(From The Washington Post)

From MakingHealthEasier.org

unicef:

CAN YOU SEE ME?
Djacarida Sama (age 2) has severe malnutrition and malaria. His blood pressure is measured at the UNICEF-supported district hospital in Koulikoro Region of Mali. Twenty-eight of the hospital’s child patients have malaria; six of them, including Djacarida, are in critical condition. Conflict in the country’s north, food shortages and inadequate basic services continue to exact a toll on Mali’s children.

© UNICEF/Tanya Bindra

More photos at: www.unicef.org/photography

unicef:

PHOTO OF THE WEEK: 1 November 2012

Women tend their sick children in the paediatric ward of a UNICEF-supported hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia.

Under-five mortality rates in Somalia are the second highest in the world and have not changed since 1990. In the same timeframe, global rates have declined from 12 million deaths per year to 6.9 million annually. This tragedy for Somali children is the result of poverty and drought conditions that cannot be addressed because of decades of war.

©UNICEF/Kate Holt

To see more: www.unicef.org/photography