Cost of Malnutrition to Girls: Interactive Data
Addressing malnutrition is crucial for girls’ futures, to break the cycle of poverty, and help them reach their potential with better education and stable employment.
In the worst cases, malnutrition and food insecurity are costing women and girls their lives, especially during childbirth. When and where they survive, they are paying a high cost in lost opportunity and potential, with lower rates of educational attainment, a higher likelihood of living in poverty, and high risk of experiencing stress and violence.
These costs are universal and are felt to some extent in every country in the world. We invite you to click around the map and investigate the different costs of malnutrition to girls' lives, educations, income and future generations, and see how they compare between countries.
No one country has fully eliminated hunger, but by investing in essential nutrition actions and addressing systemic issues, we can enhance health, expand educational opportunities, and improve future economic outcomes for women and girls, and future generations. The world must take action in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and ensure a healthier, more equitable future for coming generations.
Select an area of a girl’s life impacted by malnutrition to see a heat map comparing the impacts per person in every country where World Vision works. Select multiple countries to compare using control+click on pc or command+click on a mac or search the country name in the dropdown on the right.
Interested in seeing the data all at once? You can sort the table below to look at the total numbers impacted in each country for each variable. Just click on the impact you’re interested in to re-sort the table, or click country to sort alphabetically by country name.
Interested in taking the next step? Take our nutrition challenge and walk in the footsteps of a girl in one of the eight countries above as she and her family make impossible choices in order to navigate poverty and malnutrition. Each time the game is played, World Vision will donate a meal to a child or family through our partnership with World Food Programme.
Or, if you want more information, you can read our full report, including other costs of malnutrition to girls here, or find out how World Vision is working with children and communities to end hunger for good.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is this data from?
This data is based on a review of academic literature and creates new projections based on currently available global data on population and child health, sourced from UN agencies, World Bank etc. Where numbers were missing we imputed data or used a regional average. These estimates are not perfect, but they provide illustrative estimates and demonstrate the cost of malnutrition to girls. A full methodology can be found in the annex of the report, available to download here.
Why are the income costs so high in wealthy countries where malnutrition is low?
Rates of stunting are much lower in some wealthy countries, but incomes are also generally much higher. So although the numbers of people are lower, the amount of the cost is much higher We’ve also presented the numbers as a % of per capita Gross National Income to help convey the relative cost and address this – the total annual cost to women and girls in Australia, for example, is over $2 billion, but that’s not even 1% of per capita GNI. Our estimates are similar to World Bank figures previously calculated.