Fight Rising Malnutrition in Rural Guatemala

We are excited to share this great new BBC radio piece in which  17-year-old Rosa Angelica, from the community of Sololá, explores Guatemala’s halting progress toward the UN development goal of Zero Hunger. She interviews our Nutrition Program Manager Karyn Choy and Executive Director Anne Kraemer about how it came to be that families living amidst fields of crops have little access to nutritious food—and Guatemala, a major agricultural producer, has one of the highest rates of chronic child malnutrition in the world. 

They also talk about our comprehensive approach to working with families and communities to reverse malnutrition. “This isn’t something you can solve overnight;” Anne says. “It’s not something that you can fix with one pill. So the minimum time that we spend with a family doing education, providing them with food supplementation, medical care, is six months.”

In a commentary reflecting on his 15 years of work in this field, our Chief Medical Officer Peter Rohloff underscores the importance of cultivating broad-based efforts to transform the social and economic forces driving child malnutrition while also keeping each individual child and family in view.

He writes: “It is tempting to think of big problems like stunting only in aggregate, as national or global issues to be addressed incrementally. But the enteropathy, growth faltering, and developmental challenges that the child you see today in your clinic is a very real and urgent suffering. That child's caregivers may have few resources at their disposal and perhaps little hope that things can get better.”

Thank you for making it possible for us to make real progress across communities and partner with families to find hope in the fight against chronic malnutrition!

Links:

• Read our chief medical officer's report from the front lines