The Wasting & Stunting Technical Interest Group: Generating Evidence to Challenge the Divide in Nutrition

Despite improvements in children’s nutrition over the past few decades, undernutrition remains a huge threat to the health and life of infants and young children worldwide. Health and nutrition actors have usually approached the problems of children being wasted, (thinner than they should be) and children who are stunted (shorter than they should be) as different outcomes of undernutrition with different causes and different interventions.

Facilitated by the Emergency Nutrition Network (ENN), since 2014 the Wasting and Stunting Technical Interest Group (WaSt TIG) has challenged this view, and has begun to work to provide evidence for a unified approach to tackling these two outcomes of undernutrition.