When children are malnourished, entire communities are threatened. Malnourishment, which is caused when there is an insufficient intake of the nutritious foods needed for one to grow and function normally, can stunt growth and cause developmental challenges. This means that malnourished children who survive into adulthood may be less productive members of their communities than they otherwise would be. It’s fitting, therefore, that Doctors without Borders /Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is striving to combat childhood malnutrition by building awareness, one community at a time.
Doctors Without Borders’ “Starved for Attention,” hopes to expose the neglected and largely invisible crisis of childhood malnutrition. (Photo Credit: Bernard Pollack)
Through their, Starved for Attention multimedia campaign, the 39 year old international medical humanitarian organization is providing free action kits (including multimedia documentaries, background materials about malnutrition, outreach materials, a petition and fact sheets), to help activists organize their own awareness raising events, and inspire their communities to become part of the solution.
Although 195 million children around the world suffer from malnutrition every year — 90 percent of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia —activists have struggled to draw sufficient international attention to the issue. “Starved for Attention,” strives to succeed where other awareness rising campaigns have failed, by rewriting the story of malnutrition through a series of documentaries that seamlessly blend photography from award-winning photojournalists, with poignant video footage.
While current food aid programs tend to focus on fighting hunger—not on treating malnutrition— this campaign highlights the importance of ensuring that children receive the vitamins and essential nutrients needed to ward off disease and grow into healthy adults. This is an extension of MSF’s long-standing commitment to the use of ready-to-use foods, which have been proven effective when treating life-threatening forms of malnutrition, in malnutrition hotspot, since the products first became available in the 1990s.
By capturing frontline stories of malnutrition from Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, India, Mexico, and the United States, Starved for Attention strives to end the deadly cycle of malnutrition, by giving millions of children the attention they desperately deserve.
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
