Mothers and infants are particularly vulnerable to the effects of poverty. Young mothers need to get the right health care, the education and training, access to food, vitamins and medicines; their children deserve and need a healthy mother, good nutrition and a safe environment to live in.

Today, insufficient progress has been made in ensuring that these basic conditions are met universally and, as a result, people are suffering, mortality rates for mothers and children are high – deaths that could have been prevented - and the society is paying an enormous price.

Today, about 146 million children, or one in four children in developing countries, are underweight(1). In India, every second child under the age of 5 is malnourished. This world epidemic contributes to more than half of children’s deaths, about 5.6 million per year, or 10 children a minute.

Today, children are born underweight because of their mother’s malnutrition; by the age of 2, these children face stunting and irreversible damage to their brain and intellectual capacity. In Pakistan, every day, one out of three people does not consume enough food to lead a healthy life.

Today, young mothers and their children have very low resistance to illnesses because they are seriously deficient in micro-nutrients such as calcium, iodine, vitamin A and iron. In Madagascar, one out of two children is affected by chronic malnutrition and one out of six children dies before the age of five.

Today, many women are isolated, have insufficient access to education and training, and often have unsafe feeding practices without being aware of it. In Nicaragua, 36 percent of pregnant women do not receive prenatal care and in Burkina Faso, in 2003, only 38 percent of pregnant women benefited from prenatal consultations and 55 percent of pregnant women are anemic.

Palms for Life Fund supports projects that help poor mothers and children gain access to better nutrition as well as education and training. Many studies indicate that the lack of adequate knowledge and training is often the major cause of malnutrition. Therefore, special attention is paid to initiatives that have found creative ways to educate mothers, especially those living in remote isolated areas where malnutrition is highest.

In the area of HIV/AIDS Palms supports initiatives that strengthen preventive actions in a decentralized and participatory way.

Palms also supports the free distribution of enriched food supplements, specially designed for mothers and children (over 6 months old) in those cases where mothers are too poor to access food and need to keep a minimum healthy diet to avoid malnutrition. This is the case for instance in remote rural areas of Burkina Faso or Nicaragua, or in the slums of Pakistan and India or during the dry season in Madagascar. In those cases, the first immediate focus is on protecting the mother and the baby from hunger and malnutrition because of the irreversible damage those cause.

Feeding and educating malnourished mothers and providing the right food and micro-nutrients to their infants provides an answer to a very concrete, palpable set of problems that can not be ignored and need to be addressed TODAY. It is a known fact that international aid has a very brief window of opportunity to act, before children reach the age of 2. After this, it is too late. The damage will be irreversible.

In the short term, the mother and her baby can have access to a minimum health package and sufficient food.

In the longer term, healthy mothers and babies will become essential players in the countries’ poverty reduction efforts; children will be healthier and able to perform better in school. Mothers will be duly informed and able to apply their knowledge to their everyday life and raise their children in a healthy and safe environment.