Small investments in nutrition could make the world brainier

Kebita Naima was a month pregnant when men with guns burned her home and stole everything she had. Terrified, she fled her village in eastern Congo. With a dozen relatives she walked for a week, hoping to reach Uganda, the calmer country next door. “We had nothing, no food at all,” she recalls—only water from streams and wild fruit. When she crossed the border she was “so weak and so hungry”.

That journey, and the months of deprivation that followed, affected her unborn daughter, Ms Kebita suspects. Sitting outside her home in Lobule, a village in northern Uganda, she notes how the girl, Amina, now 11, is noticeably slower than her younger brother, Mubaraka, who was better nourished both in the womb and in infancy. He started to talk a year earlier than his sister, and to walk nearly two years earlier. “He always wants to know things. He sees older kids climbing trees, and he wants to join in,” says his mother.