News that Kenya is on a list of countries with severely stunted children under the age of five years old is frightening. According to a new Unicef study, last year close to 40 per cent of Kenyan children in this age bracket suffered severe growth limitations due to poor nutrition. When weighed against the population, this is huge.

It means that, combined with malaria and HIV and Aids, lack of food and poor feeding habits are taking their toll on children. Biting poverty and severe drought has reduced the options available to the poor, who make up a majority of Kenya’s population.

Undernutrition now contributes to more than one third of all deaths in children under the age of five. It saps their strength, making them more likely to succumb to illness, including pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria. In families where parents are both poor and infected with the Aids-causing virus, this is a virtual death sentence for the children.

Kenya’s under-five mortality rate is alarmingly high, with 128 children per 1,000 live births dying every year by some accounts. (A new Planning ministry demographic health survey claims this has fallen to 74). Undernutrition is caused by poor feeding and care, aggravated by illness. Children who do survive, says the report, more often than not "get locked in a cycle of recurring illness and faltering growth — diminishing their physical health, slowing their development, damaging their cognitive abilities and impairing their capacities."

One of the goals of Kenya’s Vision 2030 plan for growth envisages clean water for all in another 21 years. However, outbreaks of severe dysentery and cholera are testament to the fact that very little progress has been made in this area. A malnourished child attacked by diarrhoea due to a lack of clean water, or adequate sanitation, or because of poor hygiene practices will lose nutrients to the disease. If the same child is already weakened by nutritional deficiencies, she dies.

What is even more sad, going by the Unicef report, is that many such children need not die; a third of those who die from pneumonia, diarrhoea and other illnesses can survive if they are not undernourished.

Chronic nutritional deprivation often begins in the wombs of undernourished mothers, 90 per cent are of whom are found in Asia and Africa. The mother may die during childbirth, and the baby, if her or she survives, will suffer severe health problems during infancy. For girls, it affects their reproductive health when reach childbearing age.

Women who were stunted as girls, whose nutritional status was poor when they conceived or who did not gain enough weight during pregnancy deliver underweight babies. In short, the child’s health is linked to the health of the mother forever.

All this could be turned on its head, if we all took greater interest in the status of women. One of the findings of the report is that in countries where women have a low status, chances are that undernutrition of babies under five years will be prevalent.

Why? Because when society puts hurdles in the way of women getting education and employment, or starting their business, they lack the tools to protect both themselves and their infants from the effects of poverty and ill health. In turn, the health of the mother is linked to the status a woman has in the society in which she lives. In many developing countries, the low status of women is considered to be one of the primary reasons for undernutrition across the life cycle.

An undernourished child has a low Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and tires easily, making them do poorly in school. When they become adults, they will be less productive and earn less than their healthy peers. Thus undernutrition and poverty is a vicious cycle that crosses generations.

There are simple things that can be done to arrest the cycle. These include exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months and continued breastfeeding and eating of appropriate foods, and adding vitamin A to the diet, to boost resistance to disease, and zinc, to treat diarrhoea. All this requires initiating education of mothers and mothers-to-be.