More than half a million Rohingya refugees, 60% of them children (UNICEF 2017), have crossed the border into Bangladesh, joining refugee camps or settling informally, and are in dire need of basic services such as food, health care, and protection. To support their humanitarian intervention in the fields of health, nutrition, wellbeing and protection, UNICEF requested this rapid evidence review.
In emergency situations, older people may find it hard to access food. For example, when they are displaced, older people may face difficulties in registering for the general food rations, meet challenges in accessing food distributions and difficulties transporting the food. This document provides general guidance for the implementation of emergency nutrition activities ensuring the inclusion of older people and addressing their specific needs.
Its primary target is humanitarian actors working in the field – no specific knowledge of nutrition is assumed.While the guidance recognises the connection between nutritional wellbeing, food security and health care it does not provide guidance on programming in these areas. These can be found in other HelpAge documentation. At both global and field level, this guidance can also be used to highlight and advocate for the nutrition needs of older people in humanitarian crisis.
In this paper we review the evidence on the impact of large shocks, such as drought, on child and adult health, with particular emphasis on Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. Our focus is on the impact of shocks on long-term outcomes, and we ask whether there are intrahousehold differences in these effects.
The evidence suggests substantial fluctuations in body weight and growth retardation in response to shocks. While there appears to be no differential impact between boys and girls, adult women are often worse affected by these shocks. For children, there is no full recovery from these losses, affecting adult health and education outcomes, as well as lifetime earnings. For adults, there is no evidence of persistent effects from transitory shocks in our data.
This plan aims to reinforce community resilience to food insecurity by strengthening the following areas: access to and availability of food; household food security and nutrition and livelihoods; community-based disaster risk reduction; access to safe water and hygiene, and health awareness.
The plan will unite and support the efforts of partners and contribute to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 2, to end hunger and achieve food security, as well as priority actions of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.
