Stop nutritional stunting of young children.

The physical height of our children is a leading indicator of the future health of the nation, its social stability and its economic prospects. Yet we are trapped by poor nutrition that damages children before they go to school and erodes human capital all along the way.

South Africa’s last national anthropometric survey was in 2016. It found that 27% of our children under five fell below the second standard deviation. That’s almost twelve times as many children as should be expected to be there. When only one in forty of our children is short-for-age – and not one in four – we will have achieved zero-stunting. There is some evidence from community surveys that stunting may be starting to decline faster than before.19 From these and other local surveys, it appears that the national prevalence may be closer to 22–23%. However, we know from a South African systematic review that declines in stunting can stall or even regress. For both these reasons, we must intensify our efforts to accelerate any gains that may have been made.

DGMT will continue to invest in a national zero-stunting campaign that seeks to intervene during the first 1 000 days of a child’s life by supporting parents and caregivers to encourage behaviour change and reduce rates of stunting. DGMT will also explore how we can leverage a child-centred food systems approach through our responsive grant-making in order to better understand and support initiatives that address food system reform, climate change and make early learning programmes hubs for nutrition.

Alongside this work, DGMT will continue to support research that measures the nutritional status, and development progress, of South Africa’s children, at both a provincial and district level, to build a strong evidence base where it has historically been sorely lacking. It will support the emergence of a strong political coalition and proto-agency, able to engage effectively with the Food and Nutrition Security Committee facilitated by the National Department of p lanning, Monitoring and Evaluation.

five-year aim:

› Reduce the prevalence of stunting for children under 5 from approximately 23% to 16% by 2027.

ALL CHILDREN ON TRACK BY GRADE 4