"Growth has helped millions to avoid malnutrition but it still threatens to hold back a generation of rural Chinese."

A recent article in The Economist about malnutrition in rural China cites REAP's research on anemia.

“The propaganda message, scrawled in white paint on the side of a wood-frame house, could hardly be more blunt: ‘Cure stupidity, cure poverty’. The cure for both, in one of China’s poorest counties, seems to be a daily nutritional supplement for children. At a pre-school centre in Songjia, as in more than 600 other poor villages across China, children aged three to six gather to get the stuff with their lunch. If China is to narrow its urban-rural divide, thousands more villages will need to do this much, or more....

"'Babies are probably 50% malnourished' in poor rural areas, says Scott Rozelle, co-director of the Rural Education Action Programme (REAP), a research outfit at Stanford University which has done extensive tests on anaemia in rural China. 'But almost no mums are malnourished.' Mr Rozelle says that in one of his surveys rural mothers showed a better understanding of how to feed pigs than babies: 71% said pigs need micronutrients, whereas only 20% said babies need them."

Read more here.

REAP's Gansu eyeglasses project was featured on CNN's Global Public Square, a program that invites international thinkers and leading journalists to discuss global issues .

When asked about his theory to "think small," Stephen Dubner, the co-author of "Think Like a Freak," said, "We write about these economists who wanted to help education like a lot of people do, and they were in China doing some research and they noticed something very small, which was that if you look at a class picture of these kids in Gang Su province in China, which is rural and poor generally, none of the kids were wearing glasses. And they thought well, that's either because they need them and they don't have them or there, you know, there's no myopia here. And so they did some tests and they found there was plenty of myopia, plenty of kids needed them, but they didn't have them.

"So, they thought let's run an experiment. Just take something as simple as providing free glasses. Half the kids they gave them to, the other half they left as a control group, they left them as is. And after one year, the kids who got the glasses were basically a full grade ahead. Does that solve the education problem? Of course not. But it's an example of how whoever is out there hearing this, whatever realm they're working on, if you peel off a small piece where you can actually get data, figure out what's going on, you can make some progress. I would rather have 100 smart people working on small versions of one big problem than 100 people shouting at each other about the big problem and getting nowhere."

Watch the full clip here.