Ghana launches its chapter of Cost of Africa

The Cost of Hunger Africa (COHA) project is being led by the African Union Commission with support from the Economic Commission for Africa and the World Food Programme (WFP).

Ghana is one of the 12 African countries where the study is being undertaken.

He said malnutrition in the form of stunting affected 28 per cent of children under five.

That, he said, meant almost one in three Ghanaian children fewer than five were stunted, adding that other nutritional indicators such as wasting, underweight and anaemia, were also very high.

He said that because some of those forms of malnutrition were not visible, a sizeable number of Ghanaians believed that malnutrition was not a serious issue in the country.

“On the contrary, stunting and other forms of hidden hunger are destructive and very costly to national economies; they negatively impact on the brain’s development and impair learning among children. Undernutrition contributes to low productivity in adults and presents reproductive challenges in women,” he said.

According to him it was for those reasons that COHA was of utmost importance to the country as it would determine the total cost burden of hunger and enable the country to develop policies and strategies to reduce its impact.

Mr Mettle-Nunoo said it was equally important to find out the bill for mental and physical illnesses that were linked to inadequate nutrition and to juxtapose those costs against the cost of ending hunger and preventing people from suffering that preventable fate.

“As a country, hunger and undernutrition have no place in our growing democracy and we hope that this landmark study will help us engage in more public discourse about the true cost of hunger, and the concrete steps that we can take to make our country a hunger-free”, he said.

For his part, Mr Ismail Omer, WFP Representative and Country Director said in Ghana, the 2009 Nationwide Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis estimated that five per cent of the population (approximately 1.2 million people at the time), was food insecure.

He said while the figure masked huge regional differences across the country, it could also lull people into concluding that hunger and nutrition were not challenges in the country. 

“But the true picture speaks otherwise. Nutritional indicators in the 2008 Ghana Demographic Health Survey point to the fact that 28 per cent of children under five are stunted, nine per cent are wasted, 14 per cent are underweight and as much as 78 per cent are anaemic. There is work to be done”, he said.

Story by Mary Mensah