Global context for nutrition financing

Introduction

GLOBAL CONTEXT FOR NUTRITION FINANCING

Nutrition investments affect human capital formation, which in turn affects economic growth. Malnutrition is intrinsically connected to human capital because undernutrition contributes to 45 percent of child mortality and because stunting is known to be associated with lost productivity and earnings in adulthood (Shekar et al. 2017). Moreover, one in five adult deaths can be attributed to dietary risk factors. Nutrition investments, particularly in the first 1,000 days of a person’s life, yield high returns and have proven to be cost-effective.1 Two landmark reports from the World Bank, Scaling Up Nutrition: What Will It Cost? (Horton et al. 2010) and An Investment Framework for Nutrition (Shekar et al. 2017), shed light on the costs of scaling up high-impact nutrition interventions to achieve the global nutrition targets endorsed by the World Health Assembly in 2012, and which have since been adopted as the Sustainable Development Goals’ nutrition targets for 2030.

Growing recognition of the value of investments in nutrition, its multisectoral nature, and the need for stronger coordination and accountability mechanisms led to the establishment of the current global architecture for nutrition. Appendix A presents a framework for actions to achieve optimum fetal and child nutrition and development, as published in The Lancet (Black et al. 2013), which illustrates the multisectoral dimension of nutrition as represented by both nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions. The Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement was launched in 2010 as a unique global movement to catalyze support for countries prepared to “scale up nutrition” through a multisectoral and multistakeholder approach that involves networks of governments, development partners, foundations, civil society organizations, and business entities.2 In 2013, the Nutrition for Growth initiative was launched, whereby governments, development partners, and business and civil society leaders convene a summit every four years and publicly announce commitments to nutrition policies.3 The commitments, including financial commitments, made by the participating stakeholders are followed up through several forums and analytical work, including the annual Global Nutrition Report, which gathers and publishes