international hunger summit in London
People queue at an emergency feeding tent during Ethiopia's famine in 2003 Photo: REX
In the first-year classroom of Shemena Godo Primary School, in Boricha, Ethiopia, three dozen children study the alphabet. On a black chalkboard, teacher Chome Muse highlights the letter B and writes the combination with each vowel. Ba, be, bi, bo, bu.
The pupils, crowded two or three to a desk, listen to the sounds. I am watching one boy in particular, Hagirso, who sits at the back of the room. He copies the letters in his tattered notebook and proudly shows me his first attempts at writing, a triumphant milestone in early childhood development.
Hagirso, though, is no child. He is 15 years old. I first met him 10 years ago during the Ethiopian famine of 2003. He was in an emergency feeding tent, on the verge of starvation and weighed just 27lb when his father carried him to the clinic. The doctors and aid workers feared he wouldn’t live.
Miraculously, Hagirso survived, but the damage of severe malnutrition had been done.
When I next saw him, five years later on the family’s small farm in the southern highlands, Hagirso had gained weight but not much height. He was then 10 years old and just over 3ft tall. He wasn’t in school.
“He isn’t able,” his father, Tesfaye Ketema, told me. “I can see from his growth he isn’t so good. He is stunted.”
Tesfaye Ketema with his 15-year-old son Hagirso, who suffered malnutrition in the Ethiopian famine of 2003.
Stunted. It is a harsh, ugly word. Often spoken in clinical, analytic terms – “standard deviations” of height and weight, “suboptimal” brain development – it is the manifestation of malnutrition: diminished physical and mental capacity. It is a word that has been heard more frequently in recent years, as the world confronts the shame and the peril of hunger in the 21st century. It is a label for some 165 million children under five years of age in the world. It has become a target; at his hunger summit at the close of the London Olympics, the Prime Minister David Cameron outlined a goal of reducing the number of stunted children worldwide by 25 million by the opening of the Rio Olympics in 2016. And it is a word that will be front and centre in the minds of those who gather at the Nutrition for Growth: Beating Hunger through Business and Science summit in London on June 8.
But just what does it mean to be stunted? It means as a teenager, struggling to keep up with six-year-old classmates, being one of the smallest in school, getting sick more often than your friends because of a weakened immune system. It means, in all likelihood, falling short of your potential, a life sentence of underachieving. This is the life of Hagirso.
''He is average despite his age,” says his teacher. He places Hagirso’s performance in the middle of the class of 56, where most of the children are younger than 10. Hagirso today stands just over 4ft tall and most days goes to school barefoot and on an empty stomach.
He and his fellow first-year primary pupils are just learning simple maths, so he is unable to comprehend the equations – volume of a circular cylinder, area of a trapezoid – written on wooden signs hanging from the trees in the schoolyard. The lessons drawn on the outside walls of the classrooms – the periodic table of elements, the human digestive system, a map of Africa – are just so much graffiti to him. Words of encouragement, leaping from other signs, are lost on him: “Try try until you get the result”; “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”; “A man without a plan is nothing”. Hagirso, just learning phonics, is unable to put those ambitious aphorisms into action.
“I’m always thinking that those early years really impacted his life,” his father says. “He hasn’t grown. I know at times he has trouble understanding.”
Stunting often begins in the very early months of a child’s life, particularly in the first 1,000 or so days – including the period of pregnancy – and ending with the child’s second birthday. Malnutrition then can prevent critical brain development and slow physical growth.
Hagirso’s parents are poor smallholder farmers, tending less than an acre of land. The family has rarely known a year without a hunger season, the months between harvests when the food cupboards are bare. Tesfaye acknowledges that since his son’s birth, Hagirso’s diet has lacked important micronutrients, such as vitamin A, iron and zinc. Then, when drought and famine hit in 2003, Hagirso rapidly declined. His father began selling the family’s few possessions to buy food. First he sold his ox, which pulled the plough. Then he sold the family cow, which provided milk. Then he sold the goats. With nothing left, Tesfaye carried his starving son to the emergency feeding tents.
Now, a decade later, when Hagirso should be preparing for a productive adult life, he is just starting school. He is often sick; his first attempt to begin school last year was cut short by a bout of malaria. He helps out a bit on the farm, mainly pulling weeds. His father hopes that, with an education, Hagirso will be able to “get out of this community”, get a job in a city somewhere, send some money home to help care for his family. But that’s still many years away for a teenager only beginning to read and write.
Hagirso is hardly alone in being behind. He’s not even the oldest in his class; one classmate is 16, another is 17. In Ethiopia, about 44 per cent of children under five are stunted, according to the country’s own estimation. That, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), adds up to more than five million children. In subSaharan Africa, about 40 per cent of children are stunted; in South Asia, 39 per cent.
The toll of stunting is profound and far-reaching, spreading like concentric rings from the individual. Not only does poorer educational performance reduce the individual’s future earnings potential in adulthood (perhaps by as much of as 25 per cent, according to some studies), it also cheats the economic growth of the family, the larger community and the nation as a whole. World Bank reports and data gathered in individual countries have estimated that widespread stunting can cut several percentage points off a nation’s GDP. This impoverishment in turn saps the potential of global trade.
And then there is the opportunity cost: who knows what a child might have contributed to society if not for stunting?
It was Hagirso who pestered his father to be allowed go to the primary school just a 10minute walk from their house. With more than 2,000 children enrolled in the school of 17 classrooms, the learning is done in shifts. One week Hagirso leaves home at 8am; the next week at noon.
“I like school,” he tells me. “I’m doing better.”
Hagirso’s determination to attend school reflects a national effort to overcome the burden of stunting. Since the 2003 famine, the government, private sector and humanitarian agencies working in the country have prioritised nutrition; the health posts proliferating throughout the countryside now specialise in mother and infant health, with an emphasis on sharing information on the 1,000 Days. The nationwide percentage of children under five who are stunted has fallen to 44 per cent from 57 per cent in 2000.
It’s progress, “but we have to accelerate,” says Tweldebrhan Hailu Abrha, the country director of Alive and Thrive, a programme which seeks to reduce chronic malnutrition.
“Otherwise, what dreams our country has of developing may not be realised. If you don’t have a fertile brain to receive training and teaching, you can’t develop economically.”
The same is true for Hagirso. His dream is to be a teacher, “a teacher who makes a lot of money,” he tells me in class while his own teacher laughs.
At least he’s made a start.
'Last Hunger Season’ by Roger Thurow (Perseus Books) is available to pre-order from Telegraph Books at £10.99 + £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
Roger Thurow’s recent reporting from Ethiopia was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
comment Needless to say, Axum in Ethiopia was a naval and trading power that ruled the region from about 400 BC into the 10th century. As proud as we should be of our past, we don’t live in the past. We are taken over by the late comers by millennia. We know that occupy, control and exploit is your ethos. Why even talk about Africa if it is hopeless. Leave us alone, we do or die. That is what we I can't understand what the author wants to achieve in this article. Why is the issue of famine brought up as a major theme at time when the country is experiencing tremendous economic growth, where hunger and poverty is declining fast. Even worse, defamatory, racist and stupid comments by many readers are outrageous. Yes, there are still millions suffering from hunger not because of their fault. While Ethiopians must accept responsibility for the problems, the governments of the West are the root causes of most of the problems we see in Ethiopia and Africa in general. The inventors and leaders of the huge international corruption conglomerate are your governments in the west. It has long been recognised that the food aid, development assistance, NGOs, western economic advisors to African governments, etc. are strategies you use to control and exploit Africa. Assistance of the highest order Africa needs at the moment is withdrawal of all forms of assistance from the west. We are praying for the west to leave Africa alone. Africa did not need you from the beginning. Africa doesn’t need your assistance. Just leave Africa alone. That is the only thing we ask you for.
I do not agree with you commentary. It lacks professionalism and sound intellectual judgment. It is shallow. In order to write such observation and generalization you should invest your time, brain and yourself as human being. Very difficult to anybody to understand such intricate country and society. Snap shot visit is not enough to write anything.
On your rant about my country's past and present famine issue, you've called us lazy, incompetent, sexist, sexually deviant, ignorant, have I left out anything?????
From over population, corruption, sexism, racism, bad cultural practices (female circumcision), bad social habits (boonabate), prostitution, violence, disease, famine, etc. Now, I don't need to tell you that therefore: if we eliminate poverty, which we are pushing aggressively with the help of other nations, then most of above mentioned social issues will disappear. I'm certain you agree to this because this is universal. And by the way, you make is sound like every Ethiopian breathing soul is surviving because of you. Look at your statement: ".....tens of millions more Ethiopians expecting us to feed them? Then scores of millions; then hundreds of millions". really ? you're feeding hundreds of millions? Go back and look at the stats to how much aid is does the UK (I think that's where you are from) gives to Ethiopia. You will be surprised to learn....................And you can only speak for your country only because it's none of your business how much for example China or US gives to us because they have their own reason for helping. And by the way, you do have hundreds of thousands if not millions of people receiving some kind of assistance in the UK. Just look at the number of charities you have. But because UK is rich enough it does not need outside help. Let me ask you this: Did the people of England woke up one day and all the sudden became more intelligent, more rich, more educated, of course not, it took hundreds of years. I guarantee you that we Ethiopians will get there too, much sooner than you think. Now in order to achieve this, do we need other nations help? of course we do. I agree with you that some aid has been more harmful than helping, which is why we are looking to end certain aid packages, instead what we need is, which we are pushing aggressively, outside investments, develop our untouched minerals (gold, oil, potash, etc) modernize our agricultural sector, which we are doing, educate our young population, which we are doing. There were 4 universities in Ethiopia twenty years ago, there are over 35 now.
Now in order to facilitate economical growth every country needs good governance. We Ethiopians, in fact most developing nations had the unfortunate case of having brutal dictatorial governments for so long which is actually one of the main cause of poverty, therefore: they could not develop as fast as Western nations. So therefore what we need in EThiopia is free and democratic government. Our current government has done excellent job of promoting economical growth but it's not democratic enough. We need outside nations help to push this government to be more democratic. Then leave the rest to the people. It will only take one generation. we can emulate the success of east asian nations, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea etc.....30 years ago these countries where aid recipients.
Ethiopia is a nation of of great history and ancient civilization. Our ancestors had created our language, our own alphabets, numbering system, our own calendar.......we had kings, queens, emperors, warriors (which had defeated the colonialists in a battle), we had intellectuals, authors, religious scholars.....It's the second nation on Earth after Armenia to accept Christianity................we just had bad luck in the last 80 years or so. But Jesus willing we will get there. Ethiopia is not all the doom and gloom you've described it as my friend. take care!!!!
Ethiopia is twice the size of France.
Anybody who has been to Ethiopia knows that it has huge areas of consistent rainfall and great fertility. There was never any reason for Ethiopians to go hungry. Forget what Geldof said.The fault lies, as always, with an authoritarian centralised government in Addis Ababa.
