How can we produce a time series of childhood wasting estimates, accounting for climate impacts?
The Issue
To better understand prediction trends in the prevalence of wasting at country levels, UNICEF needs to improve the comparability of data sets available to them. Currently, UNICEF has an established database of malnutrition variables associated with other demographic components contained within Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Surveys (MICS) and other district-level national surveys such as the Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS). Although the data is consistent from survey to survey, the sampling of malnutrition variables (stunting and wasting) is not consistent in terms of the agricultural calendar. This means that surveys have been taken effectively randomly throughout the year and most surveys have occurred over extended periods of time and are often conducted at different times of the year. Therefore, consistency is a problem for comparing countries and establishing patterns over time in the same country. As wasting is an inter-annual variable this distribution of sampling directly impacts the comparability of data sets.
Why Does it Matter?
Article 24 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that every child has the right to the best standard of health, including nutritious food.
Undernutrition is associated with 45% of child deaths (source WHO). Undernutrition manifests in four broad forms: wasting, stunting, underweight, and micronutrient deficiencies. Wasting is the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition. It results from the failure to prevent malnutrition among the most vulnerable children (source UNICEF). Stunting is the impaired growth and development children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation (source WHO).
Early detection and treatment of children with wasting and other life-threatening forms of malnutrition are critical to saving their lives and putting them on the path to healthy growth and development.
UNICEF works with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other partners to develop global guidelines for the early detection and treatment of child wasting and helps governments update and align their strategies with global policy (source UNICEF).
While the number of children being treated for wasting and other forms of life-threatening malnutrition has risen in recent years, only one in three children with severe wasting is reached with the timely treatment and care they need to survive and thrive.
Our Project
This project sets out to establish if it is possible to use secondary (other existing) variables to estimate wasting where it has not been previously measured. This involves correcting the temporal inconsistencies in sampling, allowing for a more effective historical trend and subsequent projection to the future. There are plans for 3 modelling attempts to explore how to achieve this. Firstly, the research team will link stunting data that is also collected to prevalence of wasting between surveys based upon the hypothesis that stunting is an integration of past wasting and its variation between surveys gives an indication of past wasting intensity. This work will be conducted across multiple countries including but not limited to Nigeria, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso & Bangladesh. Secondly, there will be a deep dive into the potential relationship between diverse spatial variables and wasting values using standard and Bayesian approaches.
Key outcomes:
1) A meta-database with survey data, census data, land use and land cover, yield values, infrastructure networks and market information.
2) A report with a comparison of the two models built with recommendations for the JME to take forward.
This approach is exploratory and based on research hypothesis generation and testing. There is good reason to believe that there are model-able relationships between wasting and other variables, but these are yet to be tested and validated.
Who is Involved
Strathmore University (Kenya)
The Environment Protection Agency in Ghana
UNICEF
University of Edinburgh
University of Southampton
WHO
