Adolescent Nutrition: Requirements, Deficiency Risks, and the Second Window of Opportunity
In Ethiopia, national survey data show that 38.2% of adolescent girls aged 15–19 are anaemic, a prevalence that rises above 45% in the Afar and Somali regions where pastoralist dietary patterns and early marriage converge with structural poverty.1 Across the broader Sub-Saharan African (SSA) region, stunting rates among adolescents remain alarmingly high - Ghana’s 2022 Demographic and Health Survey recorded that more than one in five adolescent boys aged 10–14 were stunted, a legacy of inadequate early childhood nutrition that the pubertal growth spurt cannot fully reverse. These figures are not anomalies. They reflect a long-standing policy architecture that has oriented its energy and financing almost exclusively towards children under five, leaving the nutritional needs of adolescents to accumulate quietly in the background of global health discourse.