West need to not starve Afghanistan"s youngsters of the support they need to have | @guardianletters

Detail of Muhammed Muheisen’s portrait of laiba Hazrat, a six-yr-old Afghan refugee residing in a slum outdoors Islamabad, Pakistan. Photograph: Muhammed Muheisen/AP

Whilst the worldwide local community has spent billions of lbs in Afghanistan since the US-led military intervention in 2001, the vast majority has been spent on the war work and a considerably smaller proportion on repairing the harm induced by that war and developing the nation (Half of Afghan young children endure irreversible harm from malnutrition, 27 January).

The British charity Afghanaid has been operating alongside Afghan men, girls and young children for the previous thirty years. With the help of Britain’s Department for Global Growth and generous individual donors, we are creating wells, micro-reservoirs and pipe methods to give people accessibility to clean consuming water putting in toilets to improve sanitation and educating young children and grownups in excellent hygiene. We are also helping rural communities to boost agriculture and livestock, establishing micro-enterprises and strengthening their foods security – so that households do not dwell in hunger or the dread of hunger.

Programmes this kind of as Afghanaid’s support families hold their children healthful. Even so, it is vital that when British and other global troops withdraw from Afghanistan, the global community stays committed to supplying the money that will enable companies this kind of as Afghanaid to reply to the regular humanitarian emergencies and support the extended-phrase sustainable growth that will let kids to survive and thrive.
Charles Davy
Managing director, Afghanaid, Kabul

• Emma Graham-Harrison’s graphic dispatch from Afghanistan draws attention to the proof that early-daily life deficiencies in nutrition and healthcare can have lifelong, largely irreversible, impacts on learning achievement, physical stature and grownup earning possible. And these in flip influence on longer-term nationwide prosperity and development.

But even in emerging market nations that have committed assets to tackle continual issues of maternal and child well being, a remarkable volume stays to be completed in this region.

Proof-primarily based answers to these troubles had been exposed this month at a symposium on maternal and youngster health and nutrition in emerging markets at Green Templeton University, Oxford. New evidence permits us to specify optimum environments, wellness and nutrition regimes, and new criteria for measuring outcomes. The evidence permits us to say that below optimised conditions every single youngster on Earth could have identical prospects for wholesome, productive lives irrespective of ethnicity. And simply because it opens new pathways for human resource improvement it provides the prospect of healthier, much more educable, a lot more productive adult populations, with no which prolonged-phrase financial development, cohesive societies and political stability cannot be achieved.

Governments close to the globe, notably individuals in emerging market place economies, need to accept these scientific findings and get a fresh, longer-phrase standpoint on social investment in pre-conception, neonatal, child health and nutrition.
Professor George Alleyne Chancellor, University of the West Indies, Professor Ana Langer Harvard school of public well being, Dr Sania Nishtar President, Heartfile, Pakistan, Professor Srinath Reddy President, Public Overall health Basis of India, Professor David Watson Principal, Green Templeton University, Oxford, Shengman Zhang Chairman, Citi Asia Pacific

• Muhammed Muheisen’s pictures of the refugee Afghan children (Eyewitness, 29 January) in Islamabad were really just stunning. Every 1 informed a story of suffering and trauma: the innocent faces of conflicts that destroy youthful lives, not just in Afghanistan but during the globe. A single can only hope that these displaced youngsters will 1 day be in a position to return to a homeland that is cost-free of war, and get pleasure from the childhood they deserve.
Martin Johnson
Congleton, Cheshire

West need to not starve Afghanistan"s youngsters of the support they need to have | @guardianletters