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Costa Rica outperforms her Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in terms of child nutrition, but it needs to do more to protect Tica mothers.
Save the Children, an international non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of children through better education, health care, and economic opportunities, recently issued its annual State of the World’s Mothers report.
Costa Rica was placed on the second tier of the report, which looks at about 80 developing countries. Costa Rica was ranked 13th on her tier, below Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Cuba in Latin America.
The report looks at the critical 1,000-day window of time from the start of a woman’s pregnancy to her child’s second birthday. It highlights proven, low-cost nutrition solutions – like exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6months – that can make the difference between life and death for children in developing countries.
According to Save the Children, the economic argument for early nutrition is very strong – the cost to a nation’s GDP is significant when kids go hungry early in life.
The report places Norway as the best nation in the world for mothers and their babies. Norway is followed by two other Nordic countries, Iceland and Sweden. New Zealand took the fourth spot in the report, and then the Scandinavians appeared once again to round off the top five with Denmark and Finland.
The worst places for mothers to have babies are in war-torn nations in Africa and the Middle East. Niger took the last spot on the report. Afghanistan and Yemen are also near the bottom. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and the new South Sudan are also places where mothers and their young children have a hard time.
Costa Rica is ranked third in the developing countries with regard to protection of her children, but the reason she ranks 13th overall is due to other factors directly related to quality of life for women. According to the report, women in 72 other developing countries have better opportunities in terms of education, political participation, and income equality. The lifetime risk of maternal death is one in 1,100, and 99 percent of births are attended by skilled health personnel.
Along with Brazil and Chile in Latin America, Costa Rica is one of the nations highlighted in the report as performing better on child nutrition than their national wealth might suggest.
Measures such as our Human Breast Milk Bank and the recent Sala Cuarta (Constitutional Hall) decision to extend benefits to single mothers whose children pass away could improve Costa Rica’s future rankings.
