The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation appeals to world leaders to increase global health spending in areas of need to boost children’s health and nutrition, especially in the face of the global climate crisis.

The foundation made the call in its eighth annual Goalkeepers report, released on Tuesday.

The Goalkeepers report, ‘A Race to Nourish a Warming World’, projects that without immediate global action, climate change would impact an additional 40 million children to stunting and 28 million more to wasting between 2024 and 2050.

It notes that scaling up urgent solutions can prevent this outcome while also building resilience to climate change and spurring much-needed economic growth.

“In 2023, the World Health Organisation estimated that 148 million children experienced stunting, a condition where children don’t grow to their full potential mentally or physically.

“And 45 million children experienced wasting, a condition where children become weak and emaciated, leaving them at much greater risk of developmental delays and death.

“These are the most severe and irreversible forms of chronic and acute malnutrition,” it said.

The foundation noted that as global challenges intensify, the total share of foreign aid going to Africa has decreased.

It said in 2010, 40 per cent of foreign aid went to African countries. However, that number has declined to 25 per cent, the lowest percentage in 20 years, in spite of more than half of all child deaths occurring in Africa.

According to the foundation, the trend leaves hundreds of millions of children at serious risk of dying or suffering from preventable diseases and threatens the unprecedented progress the world made in global health across Africa between 2000 and 2020.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the foundation, said, “Today, the world is contending with more challenges than at any point in my adult life: inflation, debt, new wars.

“Unfortunately, aid isn’t keeping pace with these needs, particularly in the places that need it the most. I think we can give global health a second act—even in a world where competing challenges require governments to stretch their budgets.”

According to Mr Gates, malnutrition is the world’s worst child health crisis, and climate change is only making it worse.

Amid this crisis, Gates called for maintaining global health funding to immediately address the growing threat of child malnutrition by supporting the Child Nutrition Fund.

(NAN)