ANALYSIS MALNUTRITION IN COLOMBIA

According to the National Survey of the Nutritional Situation in Colombia made in 2015, global malnutrition of children under 5 years old has reached 3.7%. At least 1 of 10 children has malnutrition and other 30% are threatened to have it. Thus, there’s an increasing need of foundations and programs, like Gencero, focused on eradicate this problem. To achieve this goal is fundamental to conduct an analysis based on the current context of the problem in Colombia considering international and local institutions. In this way, throughout this essay will be explained the main strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, respectively, which can help to solve the problem mentioned before.

Firstly, in Colombia the government and some private institutions make important investments on developing programs to help malnutrition in Colombia. For example, in seven years around 13 billion pesos had been invested by the national government only in la guajira to reduce malnutrition (EL TIEMPO, 2017) and in 2016 almost 20 million pesos were given by Gencero’s program. This helps to develop governmental and non-governmental programs to give assistance in vulnerable areas. That’s why ICBF have created a strategy of nutritional recovery; from 714 attended children in 2015, 61% got better and from 439 children in 2016, 71% showed improvement (Semana, 2016); which shows that it has had a great impact on the reached community. Continuing with Gencero’s example, according to Gencero (2016) Exito’s foundation management report, Gencero had impact not only in financial factors but in active participation on communities; in 2016, 38.823 children were attended by the program and two new regions were reached. The previous example shows that even the private sector is interested on the problem and have helped to solve it.

By the other hand, the data available about malnutrition isn’t enough to know the reality. According to Semana (2016), the only institution that counts with official figures of the number of children with malnutrition in the country is ICBF; however, is undeniable the existence of child under registration in the most vulnerable areas, which is an obstacle to knowing fully reliable data. In addition, there is no accurate information of the places where this Institute hasn’t presence, which makes it difficult to know how close to reality the official figures can be. This lack of information facilitates corruption sceneries. As an example, in 2015, according to Juan Gossaín (2016), contractors were paid 54,000 million pesos to supply the food for the students of the poorest schools in La Guajira. However, as Ministry of Education was able to confirm, of that total, only 6,600 million were spent on food. This situation shows that as it’s not possible to know the concrete malnutrition figures in Colombia, those financial resources provided by the government and private companies can be stolen by corrupt politicians or entities.

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