Women have the power to save the lives of over 820,000 young children each year and to help millions more thrive and reach their full intellectual potential.

They are physically equipped to remove billions of dollars from global healthcare costs and turn it into billions in economic prosperity. This is because women possess the ability to make milk that is the most nutritionally and immunologically potent food for infants and toddlers. Food that can fuel brain development like nothing else. Food that can protect against disease and illness and save as many lives as some of the world’s best vaccines. Food that can set a child upon a path toward better health and a more prosperous future.

Yet while women have the ability to improve the health and vitality of their children, their communities, and the world at large, they face innumerable barriers in doing so.

A new scorecard published by the World Health Organization (WHO) this week shows just how big these barriers are. It shows that no country in the world is adequately supporting women to breastfeed in line with the global recommendations.

This worldwide failure to support women to breastfeed successfully is having serious consequences. A new report by UNICEF, WHO, 1,000 Days and Alive & Thrive, Nurturing the Health and Wealth of Nations: The Investment Case for Breastfeeding, indicates that countries are losing billions of dollars each year because they fail to invest in programs and policies that help women breastfeed. For example, in China, a country where only 1 in 5 babies are breastfed in accordance with global recommendations, it is estimated that its economy loses $66 billion per year due to low breastfeeding rates. These staggering economic losses are driven by costs associated with lower cognitive capacity of Chinese children that are not optimally breastfed. 

This is because breastfeeding has been shown to play a critical role in fostering a young child’s brain development. Numerous studies have shown that shorter durations of breastfeeding for children were associated with at least a 2.6-point loss in IQ scores. Moreover, using cutting-edge neuroimaging techniques to measure babies’ brain development, researchers in the U.S. found that babies who had been breastfed exclusively for at least three months had enhanced development in key parts of the brain by age 2 compared to children who were exclusively formula-fed or who were fed a combination of formula and breastmilk. The research showed that the extra growth was most significant in parts of the brain associated with language, emotional function and cognition.

But in addition to the cognitive losses in children, poor breastfeeding rates cost countries in two other critical ways: first, in terms of higher healthcare costs to treat diseases that could have been prevented with better breastfeeding and second, the potential future income that is lost to maternal and child deaths due to low rates of breastfeeding. For example, in the U.S., researchers have estimated that over $17 billion could be saved each year in medical costs and in the costs associated with women and children dying prematurely if 90% of babies were breastfed exclusively for the first six months of life.