Technology has been revolutionizing a range of sectors for decades, but only recently has it become more widely accessible, available, and cost effective for low- and middle- income countries (LMICs).
Malnutrition is a global burden in all its forms, particularly in low- and middle- income countries . It is the cause of nearly half of all child deaths and more than one in three LMICs face the twin challenge of obesity and undernutrition.
This burden only increases as our planet grows warmer.Yet for as dire as the picture is, good nutrition can also be the great disruptor—good nutrition fuels health, education, economic productivity, and environmental sustainability. To realize this vision, in this moment of dwindling development finance for nutrition, we urgently need disruptive thinking and tools to maximize the quality, scale, and efficiency of impact.Technology has been revolutionizing a range of sectors for decades, but only recently has it become more widely accessible, available, and cost effective for LMICs. The proliferation of affordable smartphones and applications have made digital tools much more broadly available. In 2024, in LMICs, 61 percent of women and 75 percent of men used mobile internet. It is timely—given an urgent malnutrition crisis 150 Nobel and World Food Prize winners have called for bold innovations to address malnutrition by harnessing technology.Frontline workers who serve vulnerable or underserved populations have for some time used modern-day smartphones for tasks such as data collection, decision support, and client education. COVID-19 expanded this further, as virtual technology reached further into our homes, keeping many more people productively at home and enabling use of telemedicine, telehealth, and e-learning at scale. The pandemic also spurred significant advancements in public health surveillance systems, such as through contact tracing, which leave a legacy of innovative data approaches that may be valuable for future responses.But these innovations are not only the purview of governments and public services. Many of these technologies are increasingly being democratized. For instance, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence technology—including vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing—are now accessible to the public, enabling both individuals and organizations to leverage AI tools for business intelligence, decision support, and personalized recommendations.While the path and timeline will be different for all partners, there are roadmaps for action. It is not hard to imagine a future where AI-powered early warning systems help countries to see catastrophes before they happen, react to prevent them, and respond more efficiently to address them through digitally-enabled social protection systems.And a world where AI-enabled personalized nutrition for everyone, accessible thanks to technology-enabled producers, markets, and health systems—all guided by digitized enabling environments—could be just around the corner if we dream it.These dreams must be equitable. Across LMICs, 60 percent of women own a smartphone, compared to 69 percent for men. The gap is wider among underserved cohorts of women, such as those with low literacy levels, low incomes, or disabilities. As a result, the gender gap in mobile internet adoption stood at 15 percent in 2023. When designing, adopting, or evolving digital solutions, gaps in technology access, lack of data, and biases in technology development must all be considered or we risk widening these gaps further.The broad availability of AI and advancements in technology provides a transformative opportunity for LMICs to leapfrog many of the scaling and adoption challenges faced by countries that have first navigated the acceleration of technology-driven impact.The government of France is willing to spearhead this digitization for nutrition transformation agenda. Building on the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit and its call for artificial intelligence which truly serves the public interest, France is now leveraging its role as host of the upcoming Nutrition for Growth Summit to promote this agenda through an explicit track on technology.Even in this environment of crisis and global instability, nutrition transformation is possible. Technology can accelerate the pace of change—it is time to disrupt malnutrition, and unlock a nourished world.Brieuc Pont is France's special envoy on nutrition and secretary general of Nutrition for Growth.Matt Freeman is executive director of Stronger Foundations for Nutrition.The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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