A Just Transition Cannot Succeed While Children Go Hungry

Andrea Galante reflects on why food systems and human capital must sit at the centre of climate and economic transition strategies.

20 February 2026.

On World Day of Social Justice, leaders will once again affirm their commitment to a just transition. The language will be familiar: decarbonisation, green jobs, economic resilience. Yet a harder question sits beneath the rhetoric.

From where I sit, working at the intersection of food systems reform and high-level policy negotiation, the answer is clear. We cannot build resilient labour markets on foundations weakened in childhood. If children grow up hungry, the transition will falter before it begins.

The economic blind spot

Much of today’s transition debate centres on managing disruption for current workers: retraining, income support, sectoral incentives. These are legitimate priorities. But they are not sufficient. Human capital does not begin at the point of labour market entry. It begins before birth and develops rapidly in the earliest years of life. When children experience chronic hunger or malnutrition during these critical stages, the effects are enduring. Cognitive development is compromised, learning capacity contracts, educational outcomes weaken and lifetime earnings fall.

This is why child nutrition cannot be treated as a peripheral welfare concern. It is a structural economic variable. Decades of World Vision’s work in community nutrition, school feeding, social protection and livelihoods reinforce what global evidence consistently demonstrates: early-life nutrition is a determinant of long-term productivity and resilience. The ENOUGH campaign is grounded in that reality. Ending child hunger is not an act of charity at the margins of economic policy. It is a precondition for sustainable growth.

Yet the world is moving in the wrong direction. We are off track to meet both the 2025 World Health Assembly nutrition targets and Sustainable Development Goal 2. In 2024, 150.2 million children under five were stunted and 42.8 million were wasted. These figures are not technical abstractions. They signal a large-scale erosion of future capability.

Food systems shape tomorrow’s labour markets

Food systems are not peripheral to this debate — they are central. They provide livelihoods, income, and employment opportunities for more than one billion people, shaping labour markets across rural and urban economies, often in informal and climate-exposed sectors. They determine whether families can afford healthy diets, influence whether children arrive at school ready to learn, and shape communities’ resilience to shocks

Children experience food systems through the income and employment security of their caregivers, the prices in local markets, the quality of school meals, and the availability of public services

A transition that overlooks children is not forward-looking. It is short-term crisis management.

We frequently frame children as a vulnerable group in need of protection. That is necessary, but insufficient. At World Vision, we argue that children must be placed at the centre of transition strategies not as passive beneficiaries of charity, but as the foundation of long-term economic resilience.

The strategic risk of omission

There is a subtle but consequential tension in current frameworks. We prioritise protecting today’s workers from the disruption of climate policy, yet we pay less attention to whether the next generation is being prepared to participate in the emerging economy. If children’s nutritional needs are not met, future labour markets will be less skilled, less innovative and less adaptable. Inequality will deepen. Fiscal pressures will intensify. Social cohesion will fray.

This is not conjecture. It is the predictable outcome of sustained underinvestment in childhood -life. Platforms such as the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty offer an opportunity to correct course. Child Poverty and Hunger are bound together in a self-reinforcing cycle. A child who grows up nutritionally deprived is more likely to struggle in school, earn less as an adult, and raise children in similar conditions. Through the ENOUGH campaign, World Vision calls for child nutrition to be recognized as foundational to poverty reduction, economic stability and long-term resilience.

A different starting point is needed. A just transition must be judged by whether it secures children’s food and nutrition security , not only by emissions reduced or jobs created. If a generation grows up hungry, the transition will neither be resilient nor just.

Andrea Galante is a Senior Advisor for Coalitions and Global Partnerships at World Vision International, bringing together governments, organisations, and communities to confront the root causes of child hunger and malnutrition. With over 30 years of experience in nutrition and food systems including 15 years with UN agencies across more than 30 countries, she blends technical rigor with a deep commitment to children’s well-being. A former President of the Brazilian Nutrition Association, she holds a Master’s and PhD in Nutrition and is driven by a simple conviction: no child should grow up hungry.