The Power of Nutrition has a list of 49 eligible countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Each of these countries has at least 250,000 children stunted or a stunting prevalence of 30% or more.

Source: Only countries in the World Bank’s Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia & Pacific (with Pacific Island countries removed), and South Asia regions were considered for eligibility, given The Power of Nutrition’s geographic focus. Stunting prevalence data from latest surveys available in the 2020 data set of the UNICEF-WHO-The World Bank joint child malnutrition estimates. Estimated U5 population with stunting calculated by multiplying the latest stunting prevalence estimate by the corresponding U5 population according to the survey year used for the stunting prevalence estimate.

Source Low Birth Weight: UNICEF-WHO (2019) Low Birthweight Estimates: levels and trends 2000-2015

Afghanistan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Eritrea, Papua New Guinea, South Sudan and The Sudan all meet our stunting criteria, however, these countries have not been included in The Power of Nutrition’s eligible country list as they have fragility estimates below 3.0 (according to the World Bank’s FY 20 Harmonized List of Fragile Situations), indicating that programming in these countries may be particularly challenging.

* Medium Intensity conflict: identified as: (i) countries with lower intensity conflict, as measured by (a) an absolute number of conflict deaths above 250 according to ACLED and 150 according to UCDP; and (b) between 2 and 10 per 100,000 population according to ACLED and between 1 and 10 according to UCDP; or (ii) countries with a rapid deterioration of the security situation, as measured by (a) an absolute number of conflict deaths above 250 according to ACLED and 150 according to UCDP; (b) a lower number of conflict deaths relative to the population between 1 and 2 (ACLED) and 0.5 and 1 (UCDP) and (c) more than a doubling of the number of casualties in the last year.

** Countries with High Institutional and Social Fragility: identified as countries which include a range of countries that are facing deep institutional crises, that have very poor transparency and government accountability, or that have weak institutional capacity. These issues are sometimes compounded by threats posed by climate change (for example, for some small Pacific Islands states).