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The treatment and care of persons with a disability should and must be all encompassing. With the expansion of the knowledge that proper dieting can make a difference in the individual’s development and quality of life, attention must be focused on using proper food intake to remediate the negative impact of a disability. Food is related to proper healthcare; therefore, we must include proper nutrition in working with learners with exceptionalities. We must add to the list of treatments not only educational intervention, social interaction, and independent living, but also food intake. This chapter looks at the dietary needs of several disabling conditions, and addresses how particular dietary food selections help in their development and their ability to learn integration, playing skills with others, and working independently when called on to do so. Therefore, for the purposes of this chapter, we focus on exceptionalities such as cognitive disability, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Down syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), muscular dystrophy, and cystic fibrosis.

In Canada, food insecurity is characterized by the consumption of low quantity or low-quality foods, worrying about food supply and/or acquiring foods in socially unacceptable ways, such as begging or scavenging. As of 2012, approximately 15.2% of Ontario, Canada, children are living in food insecure households, a prevalence which has remained steady since 2005. This is particularly concerning when considering that school-aged children are a population whose growth and developing is sensitive to nutritional stress, and the experience of childhood food insecurity is highly associated with the development of adverse physical, mental and learning outcomes. This study aims at establishing the relationship between food insecurity and Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) standardized test scores in order to highlight the incompatibility of the EQAO's reliance on test outcomes in determining Ontarian school's accountability, specifically for those with a high prevalence of food insecurity.

Confronted with rising poverty after an economic crisis in 1995, the Government of Mexico changed its social policy. It terminated universal subsidies for tortilla and funded new investments in human capital through PROGRESA, an innovative program providing school stipends to poor children as well as health and nutrition benefits. After reviewing the main features of PROGRESA, we use the Gini income elasticity to compare the marginal impact of PROGRESA on income inequality with the impact of other social programs. PROGRESA’s impact appears to be larger than the impact of these other programs. The Gini income elasticity for each program is decomposed into two components to measure the targeting performance of each program (i.e. who is participating and who is not), and the impact of the allocation rules for the distribution of the benefits among program participants. Sensitivity analysis is performed with the extended Gini income elasticity. Beyond the impact on inequality of the cash transfers provided by PROGRESA and other programs, we also discuss the programs’ long-term impact on social welfare. Finally, we propose some areas of improvement in the design of PROGRESA and similar programs.

Food insecurity in the United Kingdom has been described as a ‘public health emergency’ which has been exacerbated by the onset and continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on research evidence and a reflective account from a current primary school teacher, this chapter highlights the multifaceted impacts of food insecurity for children in schools. It also draws attention to some important considerations around food, education and food-related interventions for practitioners supporting children in schools.

We examine the joint demand for components of a household’s diet diversity and its relationship with household and regional characteristics that embody diverse food access and utilization constraints within the framework of the dietary patterns of rice producers in Peru.

We use multivariate probit regression to account for the simultaneous nature of the choice of different dietary group components.

There are diverse food intake patterns for households, depending on their wealth, education, demographic structure, market access and geographic location, as well as past shocks. There are also several obesogenic foods that are complements to consumption, with milk being a strong substitute for some of them. Of particular concern is the high vulnerability of female-headed households to low consumption of micronutrient-rich foods as well as the high vulnerability of households with children to high consumption of beverages with added sugars. Climate shocks are also highly associated with poor diet quality.

Results show the important influence of trade on household nutrition and food security. They indicate that policy and program recommendations should focus on nutrition information (such as labeling requirements) and education so that consumers can make informed decisions. They also suggest that policy makers should focus on how to make healthy foods available during crises to prevent health issues after economic and climatic shocks.

WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, is a widely studied public food assistance program that aims to provide foods, nutrition education, and other services to at-risk, low-income children and pregnant, breastfeeding, and postpartum women. From a policy perspective, it is of interest to assess the efficacy of the WIC program – how much, if at all, does the program improve the nutritional outcomes of WIC families? In this paper, we address two important issues related to the WIC program that have not been extensively addressed in the past. First, although the WIC program is primarily devised with the intent of improving the nutrition of “targeted” children and mothers, it is possible that WIC may also change the consumption of foods by nontargeted individuals within the household. Second, although WIC eligibility status is predetermined, participation in the program is voluntary and therefore potentially endogenous. We make use of a treatment–response model in which the dependent variable is the requirement-adjusted calcium intake from milk consumption and the endogenous variable is WIC participation, and estimate it using Bayesian methods. Using data from the CSFII 1994–1996, we find that the correlation between the errors of our two equations is strong and positive, suggesting that families participating in WIC have an unobserved propensity for high calcium intake. The direct “structural” WIC parameters, however, do not support the idea that WIC participation leads to increased levels of calcium intake from milk.

There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to individual health and very little evidence comes from less-developed economies. We use individual and multi-level data from Zambia on child nutritional health to test three hypotheses consistent with a negative correlation between income inequality and population health: the absolute income hypothesis (AIH), the relative income hypothesis (RIH) and the income inequality hypothesis (IIH). The results confirm that absolute income positively affects health. For the RIH we find sensitivity to the reference group used. Most interestingly, we find higher income inequality to robustly associate with better child health. The same pattern appears in a cross country regression. To explain the conflicting results in the literature we suggest examining potential mediators such as generosity, food sharing, trust and purchasing power.

Resistances of Nongovernmental Organizations (NGO) to the construction of gendered religious nationalism are addressed. The implications of such resistances and redefinitions of gendered religious nationalism for the women’s movement in India and transnationally are also assessed.

Semi-structured interviews with leaders and/or key informants of purposively selected organizations in the state of Gujarat serve as the primary data for the chapter. Using a grounded theory approach, the study is a qualitative analysis of the interviews and a reading of major published documents, unpublished reports, and internal reports of the NGOs that were made available.

The analysis discerns three main frames deployed by NGOs in resisting attempts by the state to construct nationalism: Communal Harmony (Not Communal Violence), “Endangered” Woman and Gender Mainstreaming. The “communal harmony, not communal violence” frame views women as an ungendered part of their communities. Although women are made central to the religious violence and struggle, they are viewed as passive persons without rights. This passive frame is the “endangered woman” frame. But women’s groups and NGOs addressing the violence have actively sought to emphasize the gender aspect of all formal and informal political activities. This is the “gender mainstreaming” frame. However, the mere visibility of women in political discourse should not be confused with the feminist framing of women’s rights or mainstreaming women’s issues.

The analysis brings an organizational agency perspective to consider resistance to the gendered basis of the violence perpetrated and embedded in nationalism.

Being a child in an undeveloped country with a broken social structure actually means bearing the heavy burden of a precarious life and struggling to survive at an earlier age compared to the peers living in developed and wealthy countries. The majority of children in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region struggle for food, security, a good education, a good life and a better future. In LAC, a heterogeneous region in terms of economy and society, childhood mostly signifies a fragile period of an individual's life due to poverty, inequality and insecurity. Within this context, this study aims to explore the compatibility of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes implemented in the region to fight child poverty. The leading premises of the study are that the majority of individuals under the age of 18 strive to pursue their lives in unsuitable circumstances and that many governments take childhood and juvenile problems as a matter of concern and try to find solutions to challenges in this respect. Furthermore, the main hypothesis in this regard is that CCT programmes – though the realisation and the impacts vary depending on the countries – could produce some positive effects in fighting child poverty despite the would-be flaws in the implementation processes.

Objective – This chapter assesses the extent to which previous economic and financial crises had a negative impact on health outcomes and health financing. In addition, we review evidence related to the effectiveness of different policy measures undertaken in past crises to protect access to health services, especially for the poor and vulnerable. The current global crisis is unique both in terms of its scale and origins. Unlike most previous instances, the current crisis has its origins in developed countries, initially the United States, before it spread to middle- and lower-income countries. The current crisis is now affecting almost all countries at all levels of income. This chapter addresses several key questions aimed at helping inform possible policy responses to the current crisis from the perspective of the health sector: What is the nature of the current crisis and in what ways does it differ from previous experiences? What are some of the key lessons from previous crises? How have governments responded previously to protect health from such macroeconomic shocks? How can we improve the likelihood of positive action today?

Methodology/approach – The chapter reviews the literature on the impact of financial crises on health outcomes and health expenditures and on the effectiveness of past policy efforts to protect human development during periods of economic downturn. It also presents analysis of household surveys and health expenditure data to track health seeking behavior and out-of-pocket expenditures by households during times of financial crisis.

Findings – Evidence from previous crises indicates that health-related impacts during economic downturns can occur through various channels. The impact in households experiencing reductions in employment and income could be manifest in terms of poorer nutritional outcomes and lower levels of utilization of health care when needed. Households may become impoverished, reduce needed health services, and experience reductions in consumption as a result of health shocks occurring during a time when their economic vulnerability has increased. Women, children, the poor, and informal sector workers are likely to be most at risk of experiencing negative health-related consequences in a crisis. Real government spending per capita on health care could decline due to reduced revenues, currency devaluations, and potential reductions in external aid flows. Low-income countries with weak fiscal positions are likely to be the most vulnerable.

Implications for policy – Past crises can inform policy-making aimed at protecting health outcomes and reducing financial risk from health shocks. Evidence from previous crises indicates that broad-brush strategies that maintained overall levels of government health spending tended not to be successful, failing to protect access to quality health services especially for the poor. It is particularly vital to ensure access to essential health commodities, which in many low-income countries are imported, in the face of weakening exchange rates. Focused efforts to sustain the supply of lower-level basic services, combined with targeted demand-side approaches like conditional cash transfers may be more effective than broader sectoral approaches. Low-income countries may need specific short-term measures to ensure that health outcomes do not suffer.