Section 2.2

Chapter 2 Sustainable Development Target 2.2: malnutrition

2.2 Wasting among children under 5 years of age

The prevalence of wasting among children under 5 years of age in the region was estimated at 1.3 percent in 2024, substantially below the global estimate of 6.6 percent (Table 8). This pattern is also observed across all three subregions, each of which reported a prevalence lower than the global level.

TABLE 8.

Prevalence of wasting among children under 5 years of age (percent)

	2024
World	6.6
Latin America and the Caribbean	1.3
Caribbean	2.9
Mesoamerica	0.9
South America	1.3

Source: UNICEF, WHO & World Bank. 2025. Levels and trends in child malnutrition: UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Group Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates. Key findings of the 2025 edition. New York, USA, Geneva, Switzerland and Washington, DC. [Cited 4 April 2025]. https://data.unicef.org/resources/JME

National data (Figure 12) indicates that most countries have already achieved the WHA 2025 target of reducing and maintaining wasting among children under 5 years of age to below 5 percent. Among the 17 countries with available data, only five (Brazil, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica and Suriname) remain above the WHA 2030 target of reducing and maintaining wasting in children under 5 years of age to below 3 percent.⁴ ⁴ New official 2030 targets were recently endorsed at the Seventy-eighth World Health Assembly and will be used in the 2026 edition of this report.

FIGURE 12.

Prevalence of wasting among children under 5 years of age in Latin America and the Caribbean by country and subregion (latest year available from 2017 to 2024)