Poverty and Child Malnutrition in Bangladesh

Child malnutrition is pervasive in Bangladesh, with nearly one-half of all children below the age of five years being either underweight or stunted. The country has, however, made significant progress in reducing the incidence of child malnutrition during the last 15 years. There are large disparities in child malnutrition across gender, geographical regions, and economic groups. The empirical evidence reviewed in this article suggests that public transfer and relief programs that provide food to the poor, such as the Vulnerable Group Feeding program and the Food-for-Work program, as well as interventions by nongovernmental organizations have had significant impacts on reducing child malnutrition, especially among the poor. To attain the millennium development goal of halving child undernutrition by 2015, Bangladesh will have to scale up targeted income-poverty interventions, public food transfer programs targeted to the poor and to the regions with the largest number of malnourished children, interventions that reduce the risk and vulnerability of poor households to natural disasters, nutrition education to mothers and caregivers, and rapid pro-poor economic growth.