These included 17 urgent calls for action aimed at improving the lives of people around the world.
Tackling poverty and food insecurity were placed at the top of the list.
Our results suggest that the numbers currently used to estimate malnutrition underplay the true extent of the problem.
Assessment challenges
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We looked at data from the 18 countries in West and Central Africa.
These forms of malnutrition are known as stunting, underweight and wasting, respectively.
Children can experience each form of malnutrition, either on its own or in combination.
Children experiencing two or more of these forms were classified as having multiple malnutrition.
One reason why conventional estimates of child malnutrition understate the extent of the problem isbecause of the indicatorsused.
The Sustainable Development Goals are tracking progress until 2030.
Stunting reflects chronic, longer-term malnutrition, while wasting is an indicator of more recent, acute malnutrition.
Our study used a measure of overall malnutrition called theComposite Index of Anthropometric Failure(CIAF).
Other indicators, like those used in UN reports, do not do this.
For example, the Millennium Development Goals only used being underweight as an indicator of malnutrition.
This means it missed stunted children who might not be underweight.
Children who experience wasting but arent stunted (and vice versa) might also not be underweight.
This means theyre also overlooked.
Similarly, the Sustainable Development Goals currently report the percentage of stunted children and wasted children separately.
The CIAF overcomes this problem.
Monitoring children who suffer from multiple malnutrition is also important as different forms of malnutrition have different mortality risks.
At the regional level in 2010, there were around 15.5m underweight children (23 percent).
Around 26.4m children experienced stunting (38 percent), and 8.2m children experienced wasting (12 percent).
This shows that conventional estimates of malnutrition for the region effectively overlooked millions of malnourished children.
As such, current UN estimates dont fully reflect the extent of the problem in the region.
Thoughother studieshave looked at multiple malnutrition, they may also be underestimating the extent of the problem.
Many focus specifically on stunting and wasting, so they may neglect valuable information provided by underweight data.
Our work provides evidence to support this.
Our study also shows how the situation changed during the first decade of the new millennium.
By 2010 there were an additional 2.5m malnourished children in the region compared to five years previously.
Prevalence rates also hadnt fallen significantly.
Of the additional 2.5m malnourished children, more than half lived in rural areas.
Policymakers need reliable data to develop antipoverty policies.
