Indus Vitals

One in ten children now live with obesity, warns UNICEF, with nearly one in five overweight in Pakistan KARACHI: Obesity has overtaken underweight as the most common form of malnutrition among children and adolescents worldwide, UNICEF warned in its newly released 2025 Child Nutrition Report, urging governments, civil society, and partners to urgently transform food environments and ensure children’s access to nutritious diets. With one in ten children worldwide now living with obesity — an estimated 188 million school-aged children and adolescents — the UN agency cautioned that the trend poses long-term risks to health, learning, and development, while threatening the social and economic future of communities and nations. The report, Feeding Profit: How Food Environments are Failing Children , presents data from more than 190 countries and marks a turning point in the global face of malnutrition. It finds that the prevalence of underweight among children aged 5 to 19 has decline...

New global report urges stronger support to reach 666 million people still without electricity, mostly in rural and vulnerable communities. KARACHI: A new global report has called for urgent, tailored financial support to expand decentralised renewable energy in developing countries, warning that 666 million people — mostly in rural and vulnerable communities — still lack basic access to electricity. The Tracking SDG 7: The Energy Progress Report 2025 , released on June 25 by a consortium of international agencies, shows that while electricity access has grown to cover nearly 92% of the world’s population, the pace remains too slow to achieve universal access by 2030. Clean cooking access fares worse, with 2.1 billion people still relying on harmful fuels such as firewood, charcoal, and kerosene — contributing to serious health and environmental risks. The report highlights decentralised renewable energy — including mini-grids, solar home systems, and off-grid clean cooking tech...