Measuring Malnutrition Worldwide

The scale of global hunger is tracked through several complementary metrics, each capturing a different dimension of the problem. The FAO's Prevalence of Undernourishment indicator estimates the share of a population whose habitual food consumption is insufficient to provide the dietary energy needed for an active, healthy life; the FAO's 2023 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report placed the number of undernourished people worldwide at approximately 735 million in 2022, concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. A widely cited composite tool is the Global Hunger Index (GHI), published annually since 2006 by the organizations Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe, which combines four indicators — undernourishment, child wasting, child stunting, and child mortality — into a single score ranking countries on a 100-point severity scale, from low to extremely alarming. Countries such as Somalia, Yemen, and the Central African Republic have consistently ranked among those with the most severe hunger levels. Because it blends population-level and child-level data, the GHI is valued for capturing both the breadth and the depth of hunger, though composite indices can obscure country-specific drivers, and data quality varies significantly between nations with strong statistical systems and those recovering from conflict.