Yemi Obafemi
Microsoft Co-founder, Bill Gates, has lamented the high inflation in Nigeria and other countries as it’s not helping to tackle malnutrition.
Bill Gates disclosed this on Tuesday at the Nutrivision 2024, a Pan-African Youth Dialogue on Nutrition at Nile University Abuja.
According to him, Malnutrition also includes having access to low cost foods, particularly milk.
He said: “If you are malnourished you are at much high risk, if you do get malaria or diarrhoea, you are double at risk of dying of those things. But even if you survive you are not going to do as well as you deserve to do in your education or any of your activities.
“We see this malnutrition stunting which means height for age and part of the way we are going to solve this is by improving agricultural productivity. Malnutrition, part of it, is having access to low cost foods, particularly milk.”
On the solution to malnutrition, Bill Gate said improving productivity in agriculture especially Sub-Saharan Africa will help to tackle malnutrition in the world
“So, making food more available at low cost, using better seeds and understating that even understanding that with the climate change, we can come up with seeds that often contrive with less water or even in cases where you have too much water and be able to still be highly productive,” he said.
He noted that a lot of people are undernourished in Sub-Saharan Africa and the rate is not yet going down unfortunately. Gates lamented that the high inflation in Nigeria and other countries is also not helping in the bid to bring down malnutrition, especially in terms of having access to quality food.
He said malnutrition is often a mysterious phenomenon, as many children who suffer from it actually have access to sufficient food. However, their diets frequently lack balance, leading to inadequate nutrient absorption and subsequent malnutrition.
He futher emphasized that the Gates foundation need to work with the health and agricultural sector in the aspect of nutrition.
