Foreword
The Cost of Hunger in Africa (COHA): The Ghana Report
Over the past two decades, Ghana has made some progress in improving the nutritional status of children, particularly those under 5 years of age, recording a substantial reduction in the prevalence of stunting, wasting and underweight among these children. According to the most recent edition of the Ghana Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), in 2011, stunting among children 5 years and younger was 23 percent, down from 30 percent in 1988.
Also known as “chronic malnutrition,” stunting is a condition where children under 5 years old are assessed to be too short for their age. Wasting, or “acute malnutrition,” which carries an immediate increased risk of morbidity (disease) or mortality (death), refers to low weight-for-height, where a child is deemed too thin for his or her height. In 2011, about 6 percent of children were found to be wasting, an improvement on the 1988 figure of 8 percent.
Underweight, which reflects a combination of “chronic and acute malnutrition,” refers to low weight-for-age, a situation where a child can be either too thin or short for his or her age . About 13 percent of children under 5 years in Ghana were underweight in 2011, a substantial reduction from the 31 percent recorded in 1988. Despite this overall progress, child undernutrition remains unacceptably high in Ghana.
In March 2012, the African Union Commission (AUC), supported by the Economic Commission for Africa and the World Food Programme, launched The Cost of Hunger in Africa (COHA) to assist member states in establishing the social and economic impact of undernutrition on children and by extension national development. The study sought to estimate in a given year the additional cases of morbidity, mortality, school repetition, drop-out rates, and reduced physical capacity that could be associated with a person’s undernutrition status before age 5.
The findings for Ghana, based on data provided by Ghana’s COHA National Implementation Team, are discussed in this report, The Cost of Hunger in Africa: Implications for Ghana’s Long-term National Development. The report underscores the importance of nutrition in human development and by extension the socio-economic transformation of a country. In particular, it demonstrates that for children, especially those from poor households, undernourishment has adverse implications for school performance, and for workers it reduces productivity and ultimately earnings and household welfare. The combined effect of these consequences is a cycle of poverty that undermines national and continental development efforts.
On the basis of these findings, the Ghana report estimated the associated cost to the domestic economy of malnutrition through health, education and labour in a single year. It found that in 2012, an estimated GH¢4.6 billion (or US$2.6 billion at the time) was lost to the economy as a result of child undernutrition. The report found that positioning nutrition interventions as a top priority for poverty reduction and broad-based development is often difficult, partly because of lack of data on their short- and long-term returns. Additionally, nutrition is too often regarded narrowly as “a health issue” only, when in fact it has broader social and economic implications.
The Report makes recommendations for addressing these gaps.
It is hoped that the COHA-Ghana Report would help raise awareness among policy makers and development practitioners about the necessity of prioritising nutrition in national development planning and allocating the necessary resources to it as part of a broader strategy for pursuing social and economic transformation in Ghana.
Dr. Nii Moi Thompson
Director-General
National Development Planning Commission