Breaking the hunger cycle in the mountains of northern Pakistan

In a treatment room of the health clinic in Immit, Gulsherran Mohdsadik is slipping a measuring tape around Urwa Hussain’s left arm. Gulsherran positions the four-year-old girl on some scales. She then measures her height and the data is recorded in a book. Gulsherran is supporting Urwa as part of the Aga Khan Development Network’s (AKDN) Central Asia Stunting Initiative (Casi). The Casi team educated her parents on breastfeeding techniques, complementary feeding, dietary diversity and hygiene. They provided a nutritional supplement called Ronaq for a full year and monitored her growth each month. Over the past three years, her height and weight reached the average centile for her age. Since 2019, Casi has been tackling undernutrition in nearly 450 of the most remote mountainous regions of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Teams of nutritionists are sweeping through the valleys, speaking to villagers, assessing their health status, raising awareness of better feeding practices and, where necessary, donating high-nutrition supplementary feeding products. The overall results are positive: where Casi operates in Gilgit-Baltistan, in just five years since the project began, the prevalence of stunting among children under five has dropped from 41 to 35 per cent or just over one in three, according to an Aga Khan University evaluation. The fall in stunting is happening faster than the global average, based on Unicef data.