Nutrition
Delivering life-saving nutrition supplies for every child to survive and thrive
Around the world, at least one in three children suffer from malnutrition, including wasting and stunting. Chronic poor diets – compounded by diseases and recurrent infections – leave millions of young children wasted, often severely and acutely malnourished, a condition which is deadly if not identified and treated in time. Millions more children are plagued by stunting, with lasting harm to their physical growth and brain development.
Anaemia and underweight disproportionately affect adolescent girls and women, especially in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Iron and micronutrient deficiencies can severely damage both physical and cognitive health and also increase the risk of serious pregnancy complications such as stillbirth, preterm birth and impaired foetal growth.
The solution
UNICEF procures and delivers safe, effective and value-for-money nutrition supplies to identify, prevent and treat malnutrition in low-resource and emergency settings.
Treating severe acute malnutrition
UNICEF is the world’s largest buyer of ready‑to‑use therapeutic food (RUTF), a nutrient‑dense, ready-to-eat paste that saves the lives of severely and acutely malnourished children. UNICEF delivers nearly one billion sachets of RUTF each year, enough to treat more than six million children in critical need.
Preventing malnutrition
To improve children’s diets and to prevent severe malnutrition, UNICEF provides micronutrient powders (MNPs) and small‑quantity lipid‑based nutrient supplements (SQ‑LNS) that fill critical nutrient gaps for children in humanitarian and food‑insecure settings. MNPs give a nutritional boost when stirred into or sprinkled over a child’s meal, while SQ‑LNS come ready‑to‑eat in sachets. Every year, UNICEF delivers hundreds of millions of MNP and SQ-LNS sachets to children in need.
UNICEF also supplies mid-upper arm circumference tapes, known as MUAC or Shakir tapes. It’s a simple colour-coded tool that facilitates early identification and treatment of malnutrition in infants and young children.
Vitamin A drops
Vitamin A deficiency leaves young children vulnerable to blindness as well as common childhood diseases and diarrhoea. To strengthen children’s immunity, UNICEF delivers over 400 million vitamin A capsules to around 70 countries every year.
Supplements for adolescent girls and pregnant women
To protect the health of pregnant women, and to safeguard healthy pregnancies and births, UNICEF supplies tablets of multiple micronutrient supplements (MMS) that combine 15 vitamins and minerals essential to maternal health. On a yearly basis, UNICEF delivers MMS tablets that are enough to improve the health of more than 10 million pregnant women.
To prevent severe anaemia, especially among menstruating adolescent girls, UNICEF also delivers more than one billion iron and folic acid tablets yearly.
