“The Health Ministry has reported a decline in the national stunting rate among children, from 21.5 percent in 2023 to 19.8 percent last year…

Although the 19.8 percent prevalence is 0.3 percentage points lower than the 2024 target set by the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas), it still represents an estimated 4.48 million newborns and infants affected by stunting, including around 925,000 new cases last year.”

From Asia News Network.

“Famines are still a major global problem. From 2020 to 2023 alone, they caused over a million deaths.

Yet the long-term trend shows significant progress. In the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, it was common for famines to kill over 10 million people per decade. This was true as recently as the 1960s, when China’s Great Leap Forward became the deadliest famine in history.

But as you can see in the chart, that number has dropped sharply, to about one to two million per decade.

This improvement is even more striking given that the world’s population has grown substantially.”

From Our World in Data.

“A multidisciplinary team of researchers has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can predict acute child malnutrition in Kenya up to six months in advance. The tool offers governments and humanitarian organizations critical lead time to deliver life-saving food, health care, and supplies to at-risk areas. The machine learning model outperforms traditional approaches by integrating clinical data from more than 17,000 Kenyan health facilities with satellite data on crop health and productivity. It achieves 89% accuracy when forecasting one month out and maintains 86% accuracy over six months — a significant improvement over simpler baseline models.”

From ScienceDaily.

“Between 2018 and 2023, Indonesia’s childhood stunting rate plummeted from 30.8 percent to 21.5 percent, marking one of the fastest improvements anywhere in the world.”

From World Bank.