Nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life should be a core measurement of development progress, argues former Ethiopian deputy prime minister Demeke Mekonnen following a week of debate on development issues at the United Nations General Assembly.

[SciDev.Net] Buying infant formula contributes to gross domestic product (GDP). Breastfeeding does not. Yet breastfeeding is one of the most important investments a society can make in raising healthy, capable, and productive children.

This small contradiction points to a much larger problem in how we measure human development.

We focus on the outcomes people achieve as adults but pay too little attention to the conditions that shape those outcomes in the first place. In short, we are measuring human development backwards.

The first 1,000 days of life, ranging from pregnancy to a child’s second birthday, are the most important window for building human potential. By the age of three, much of a child’s brain architecture has already been formed.

Education, skills training, and employment matter enormously, but they build on a foundation laid much earlier. If that foundation is weak, later investments will often produce less and cost more, no matter how well they are designed or funded.

The evidence is clear. In Guatemala, children who received a high-protein nutritional supplement before the age of three went on to earn 46 per cent higher wages as adults than those who did not.

According to research conducting in Zimbabwe, children whose growth was stunted by malnutrition completed fewer years of school and earned roughly ten per cent less over their lifetimes than children who were not stunted.

These are not small effects. Research shows that proper nutrition can determine whether a child grows into a healthy, productive adult or faces lifelong constraints. When multiplied across a population, poor early nutrition leads to major productivity losses, higher health costs, and weaker economic growth.

The impact does not stop with one generation. Undernourished girls are more likely to become undernourished mothers, whose children may face the same disadvantages. Evidence shows that women who experience growth failure in childhood are more likely to have children affected by growth restriction, contributing to an intergeneration cycle of undernutrition.

Early nutrition is therefore different from many other development challenges: its effects compound across generations, not only across years. A missed opportunity in one child’s life can shape the prospects of the next generation.

If early nutrition is so important, why is it not treated as a central development priority alongside education and infrastructure? Part of the answer lies in how we keep score.

The Human Development Index (HDI) is the closest thing the world has to a shared scorecard for human progress. The index, which pulls together data on income, education, and life expectancy, is used by the United Nations Development Programme to measure a country’s development.

These are valuable indicators, but they describe what adults have achieved. They do not capture the nutrition and care children received in early life—the conditions that made those later outcomes possible, or impossible. That is like judging a building by its façade without inspecting its foundation. By the time the HDI records adult outcomes, much of the future has already been shaped decades earlier.

This is not a call to create another ranking for governments to chase or another index to be manipulated. It is a call to strengthen the HDI by giving early nutrition a meaningful place within how we define progress. Development should be measured not only by the results visible in adulthood, but also by whether children receive the opportunity to develop fully from the start.

This would not require an expensive new reporting system. Much of the relevant data already exists in demographic and health surveys conducted by governments in many countries. The gap is not in data collection. It is in what we choose to elevate as a core measure of development.

The infrastructure for action also exists. The Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement brings together governments, donors, UN agencies, civil society, and businesses in countries working through national nutrition platforms.

A small group of countries with strong nutrition data systems could pilot an approach within these existing structures. Such pilots would help address practical questions about data availability, comparability, and methodology before any wider rollout.

We do not need a perfect global standard before we begin. We can learn by doing, refine the approach, and avoid allowing the pursuit of perfection to delay action.

This is especially important at a time when official development assistance is shrinking and governments face harder choices about scarce resources. Nutrition is too often treated as one sector competing for funding alongside schools, health systems, and infrastructure. That gets the sequence wrong.

Nutrition in the first 1,000 days is not a competitor to these investments. It is what helps them succeed. A well-funded school system will underperform if children arrive in the classroom with cognitive development already constrained by malnutrition. A skills programme cannot fully overcome limits set in infancy, long before a young person encounters a curriculum or a job opportunity.

This is not an argument against schools, clinics, roads, or jobs. It is an argument for getting the order right. If we want investments in education, health, and economic opportunity to deliver their full value, we must first ensure that children have the nutrition needed to grow, learn, and thrive.

We do not need a new theory of development to act. Nor do we need vast quantities of new data. We need to look more carefully at the data we already collect, especially in low- and middle-income countries, and start measuring progress from the point where it truly begins.

Demeke Mekonnen is former deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs of Ethiopia and founder and chairman of the YADAM Foundation, a non-profit focused on tackling malnutrition.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s Sub-Saharan Africa English desk.