The Best Way to Fight Hunger is to Invest in Mothers
Speech by Anuradha Harinarayan
Save the Children Food Security Specialist
World Food Prize Day
Des Moines, Iowa
October 18, 2001
I am speaking to you today with many voices: that of a woman, a mother, an Indian, an American, and a working professional. Each of these identities gives me a different perspective, but each one has the same message:
Women are agents of change. When you empower women with the tools they need for their families and children to survive and thrive, you create positive lasting change in their lives.
Here in America, this is not a new concept. Mothers use all the resources they can to provide the best for their children: nourishing food, proper health care, clothing, shelter, education and the opportunities to lead happy, productive lives.
Mothers around the world want the same thing too: a better life for their children. The difference is that in poor, developing countries, persistent poverty denies women access to these basic resources, and traps their children in those very same conditions.
In order to help mothers give their children that chance for a better life, let me suggest to you three steps that we must take:
- Reduce the number of children dying by improving nutrition and giving mothers access to maternal health care, including family planning
- Invest in the health, education and economic well-being of girls and women
- Provide long-term food security so that women can stop living on the edge of survival, and begin to establish more stable lives.
I will go through these one at a time, but since I am going to be focusing on food security here today, let me just take a moment to explain what we mean by that term. Food security means having reliable, and ongoing, access to food. At Save the Children, food security programs are designed to free children and their families from hunger and enable them to lead healthy, active lives.
We do this in a number of ways. We help families produce more food themselves, through agricultural assistance, and we help them raise their income in order to buy food. We also make sure that they have access to credit and to food markets. And finally we work to create a healthy environment so families, especially children can be free from illness and effectively utilize the food that is available to them.
And now, let me go back to that first step to making a better life for children. It was “to reduce the number of children dying by improving nutrition and giving mothers access to maternal health care, including family planning.”
Of the 160 million malnourished children in the world nearly 25% live in India, where I was born. Unfortunately I have seen the terrible effects of poverty and malnutrition first-hand. I have seen girls, as young as 14 years old, give birth to babies who are dangerously underweight, children who are now stunted for life. I have seen undernourished children who were deprived of vital nutrients in the first two years of life, children with polio, children blinded because of Vitamin A deficiency, and children who are cognitively impaired due to severe lack of iodine. The list is really long, and really painful, but no different from other parts of the world.
This cycle of malnutrition begins very early in life. When women who are pregnant do not have enough food, or the right food to eat, their babies are born with low birth weight, which drastically increases the babies’ risk of dying from infections and malnutrition. The statistics are staggering - 4 million babies die every year within their first month and malnutrition has been shown to be a leading underlying cause of child mortality: implicated in nearly 5million child deaths EVERY Year. The story does not end here. The children who do survive are more likely to have developmental and cognitive disabilities. As adults, they have a greater risk of heart disease and stroke.
By eliminating malnutrition during pregnancy, we can reduce an infant’s risk of death and disease by almost one-third. In addition, every year, more than 500,000 women die from complications associated with pregnancy and childbirth, just about all of them in the developing world. And the prospects for a child whose mother died at childbirth are very grim – she is 3 to 10 times more likely to die before her second birthday.
The dilemma here is that, because child mortality rates are so high in poor countries, families feel that they have to have many children simply to defy the odds, to ensure that at least some will survive to adulthood.
This truly doesn’t need to happen, because there are some very simple measures that would reduce these risks dramatically. We know, for example, that women having children before they are physically mature, or having many children too close together, creates conditions that lead to the deaths of both mothers and children.
However, if women have the means to space their pregnancies, their children are more likely to survive. And when children survive, women will choose to have smaller families, and then they will be able to take better care of the children they have.
Let me give you an example. It’s the story about a little boy named Alou, who lives in Mali, a beautiful country in western Africa.
Alou is alive today because, a while ago, his parents made a decision to delay having another child shortly after he was born. You see, when Alou was still a baby, the local health workers told his young mother that he was not thriving. If she became pregnant again right away, they told her, she would not have been able to continue giving Alou the special care he needed.
So even though it is very typical in that region for women to have at least seven or eight children, one right after the other, Alou’s mother and father decided to start using contraceptives. Delaying her next pregnancy not only gave her time to help her son recover, it has also helped her to stay healthier.
This young woman learned about the benefits of family planning through education sessions carried out in her village by Save the Children staff and village health volunteers. Her access to family planning, and her ability to space the births of her children, was – quite literally -- a lifesaver.
Along with the strategies that will reduce child mortality, the second step we can take is to “invest in the health, education and economic well-being of girls and women.”
Save the Children’s food security programs, like its other efforts, focus on women and children. Women are principal producers of food in many parts of the world such as sub-Saharan Africa, and they are the primary caregivers for young children. We find that an approach focused on women has the greatest impact.
Here are two examples of how our programs work: In the Nampula province of Mozambique, the cassava root, which is part of the daily diet, is being destroyed by the Cassava Brown Streak Disease. The plant is largely grown by women and traded for shrimp and other small fish, which increases the quality of their diet. The destruction of the root crop by the disease is having a severe impact on the food available in the community. And, right now, Save the Children is busy testing and planting new and improved varieties of cassava that are resistant to the disease so we can help families remain food secure.
Perhaps one of the most critical investments in women’s health care is in improving availability and access to reproductive health care and the safe delivery of her children. Unfortunately, the majority of women in the developing world give birth in their own homes, often under unsanitary conditions leading to maternal and infant mortality.
Education is another key investment that must be made. In fact, many professionals in development believe that educating girls and women is THE most important social investment we can make. Women who receive even a basic education tend to delay marriage and childbirth, which is better for her health and that of her children. An educated mother is also more likely to provide her children with better nutrition, to seek health care when needed, and to send her children – girls as well as boys – to school.
However, illiteracy persists throughout the developing world, particularly among women and girls. Of the world’s 880 million illiterate adults, 64% are women, most of whom live in Africa. In the West African nation of Burkina Faso, the literacy rate of women is an appalling 13 percent. And worldwide, of the 120 million school-aged children who are not enrolled, two-thirds are girls.
Food security is a factor here as well, because food-insecure families are less likely to send their children to school. And, once again, it is the girls who suffer most, because they are either kept home to help look after their siblings or sent out to work to help support the family. In many areas, cultural practices prevent girls from getting the most basic primary education or even learning how to read.
Let me tell you what we’ve done in Afghanistan.
In 1995, when Save the Children first began its education program at the refugee camps in Balochistan near the Afghan border, the population was approximately 120,000, mostly women and children. Only a handful of girls were enrolled in any kind of schooling.
Since Afghani girls, by tradition, are not permitted to travel any distance alone. Save the Children initiated home-based schools in the homes of the children's parents and teachers. In what are essentially mud huts, we now teach these girls how to read and do math, and prepare them to take care of their health and nutrition needs. Today we have increased the enrollment of girls by 400% and have 8000 girls receiving a basic education.
But, if you’re a mother in the developing world, and you want to give your children a chance for a better life with proper health care and a basic education, how do you do this if you are living on less than $1 a day? In developed countries like the United States, I don’t think anyone can truly imagine what it’s like for the 800 million women living in poverty who wake up every day and wonder: how will I manage to stay alive today?
Among Save the Children’s most successful strategies for empowering women financially is our small loan program. We work with local institutions to provide access to credit and savings for poor women entrepreneurs, most of whom otherwise would not be able to develop a business.
The average loan for these women is between $50 and $75, but it makes a world of difference in their lives. With that money they can afford to invest in a donkey cart to bring produce or crafts to the local market; they can purchase supplies to sell in their own shops. Above all, they develop financial security and the confidence to take care of their families. Today, Save the Children works with nearly 135,000 women around the world. With our partners, we disbursed more than $14 million worth of loans to poor women entrepreneurs in the year 2000!
And finally, to break the cycle of hunger and poverty that we are talking about today, we have to invest in strategies to “Provide long-term food security so that women can stop living on the edge of survival and begin to establish more stable lives.”
Unfortunately, there are times when this is all but impossible. During political upheaval or natural disasters, family farms and businesses are often disrupted, or destroyed. If regional infrastructure is damaged, then supplies – if they even exist – cannot get through. To escape danger, entire villages of people may be forced to uproot themselves from their homes and become displaced, with no independent means of feeding themselves.
We see a tragic combination of all these factors in the plight of the people of Afghanistan today. Living in a harsh geographic environment, enduring more than 20 years of war and 3 years of drought, the Afghans – who already live in one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world – now face a food crisis of catastrophic proportions. Some 6 million people inside Afghanistan, and another 1.5 million in border camps, will need emergency food aid within the next few months alone.
When communities that are already food insecure go through a crisis, such as famine or war, of course our first responsibility is to help save lives. Most of us cannot imagine the desperate circumstances they find themselves in. To this day, I remember when I was working in Sudan during the drought a few years back. The food shortage had reached crisis proportions. I was at a feeding center, where the most severely malnourished people were receiving emergency treatments, and an emaciated, young woman came in with her child, who was weak and listless. I asked her how she had managed to get there, and she told me that she had walked for three days. I asked about her child, and she told me that she had four others at home. When I asked her, “Why do you bring this one?” she didn’t even look at me, but said, “I chose the one that needed help the most.”
No mother should have to make a choice like that. However, when it comes to survival – for themselves and their children – we have found that women may have to resort to desperate measures to get food, or money to buy food: many become prostitutes, or marry their daughters off early to get the traditional “bride money.”
Families and communities, too, adopt risky strategies when they are hungry and food insecure. For example, during a drought, farmers tend to plant crop varieties that are drought-resistant, even though they produce lower yields. By focusing on immediate food needs, they sacrifice long-term development and food security.
The eyes of the world have been on central Asia these days. And, given all that has happened, we all may be feeling that our perspective has changed. After all, what was important before may not feel so important today.
Yet, today more than ever before we see how the people of the world are connected and how important it is that we work together to bring hope to those less fortunate than ourselves. This morning, I invite you to take one more step -, and resolve to take action.
Now, more than ever, we must provide essential resources to women in need, to help them and their children survive, and thrive. We must not only sustain, but also increase federal funding for the types of solution-oriented humanitarian development programs that I have just described. These are the very programs that are advocated for, and conducted by, the organizations that you see represented here.
I hope you will remain committed to this cause, and sign up with one of the Planet partners today. Each of the organizations has a table set up in the room, with staff on hand to tell you how you can get involved.
Finally I ask you to do one more thing today. Please close your eyes…
Imagine if each of us in this room – hundreds of people – decided to do something about this today. Imagine if our friends and families joined us. Imagine what we could do together to bring hope to mothers and children around the world.
Now open your eyes and celebrate the power in the room to make a difference.
