Fighting world hunger for close to 40 years

Danny Glenwright and his team fight hard every day to make sure children around the world survive hunger.

“You might not know it, but malnutrition remains the number one cause of death for children under five,” said Glenwright, Executive Director at Action Against Hunger Canada.

“More than three million children die from malnutrition every year, but it is completely preventable.”

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For almost 40 years, Action Against Hunger, an international humanitarian organization, has been dedicated to the fight against hunger in some of the world’s most challenging countries.

When screening for malnutrition in a community, health workers measure the mid-upper arm circumference of children under five with a colour-coded tape.

“If we are able to determine the level of a problem to inform response, than this makes a big difference,” said Kennedy Musumba, Regional SMART coordinator for East Africa.

The tape helps to determine whether a child is in the red zone, meaning severely malnourished, yellow zone, meaning at risk for being malnourished, or green zone, which indicates the child is healthy.

“We definitely treat malnutrition all over the world,” said Glenwright.

“But one of the major aims of our work is to prevent it before it happens. We target children under five and we target mothers in their pregnancy stage and after they give birth. That is our major focus and that is what we do best.”