governments, and a possible network on science and knowledge, will provide coherent support to national plans. Performance and evaluation indicators will encourage harmonization and mutual accountability. Donors are working toward developing consistent mechanisms for measuring aid flows, while many development partners are working to align their existing contributions to national plans and incorporate nutrition into their development strategies. Finally, SUN is putting into place global leadership, stewardship, and organizational arrangements to help maintain momentum. The main investors in the implementation of SUN’s nutrition-
specific interventions, a task estimated to cost US$11.8 billion, are national governments. Ghana, Nepal, and Tanzania, for example, have already tripled national resources dedicated to nutrition. All SUN country governments are encouraged to improve the measurement of their flow of resources to nutrition, which will help ensure long-term sustainability and accountability by national governments.
What are the opportunities and challenges for SUN?
The pathway to scaling up is often influenced by spaces that can help foster the process and drivers that can help it overcome political or financial inertia. SUN has been able to strengthen existing political, cultural, and partnership spaces by working through national, global, regional, and provincial platforms. These platforms serve to amplify stakeholders’ voices. High-level national leadership drives the process by serving as a compass for nutrition activities and helping diverse stakeholders negotiate common directions and priorities. External catalysts, such as donors and regional and international organizations, can also serve as drivers but such actors must be willing to operate within the space of each national plan. For all the accomplishments of SUN since its launch,
challenges lie ahead. The incentives for governments to incorporate nutrition into their national strategies must be aligned with their capabilities and the nutrition targets they have set. Governments must recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the relevant sectors within their countries and set pragmatic goals within realistic time frames while building capacity within and across sectors. Operationalizing the second component of SUN’s dual approach—developing and strengthening nutrition-sensitive programs—is another formidable undertaking. SUN countries need more information on the cost and value-added of incorporating a nutrition lens into complementary sectors and development areas and a process for selecting the most promising sectors to engage for nutrition. Institutional arrangements, whether through a whole- of-government focal point or sectoral coordinating bodies, and incentive structures need to be in place to support nutrition actions, track nutritional outcomes, and foster collaboration among sectors.
In the end, accountability for the accomplishment of SUN’s mission lies with each participating country, though external actors can help strengthen know-how and collaboration processes if national authorities request it.
What lies ahead?
The long-term success of the SUN movement depends on the ability of member countries to convert political will into effective action on the ground. The incorporation of nongovernmental stakeholders, including the private sector where desirable, into SUN platforms can help create broader ownership of the process and develop an incentive structure for implementing nutrition-sensitive interventions in complementary sectors. Building a systematic learning agenda around SUN experiences,
outcomes, and impacts is essential. SUN countries need to partner with research organizations and to strengthen research capacity to evaluate policy processes, delivery, and scaling up of SUN interventions. Areas to focus on include multisectoral approaches and tracking progress, improving outcome monitoring, identifying optimal institutional arrangements, and assessing the movement’s impact and cost-effectiveness. Documenting the obstacles that countries encounter and the “wins” they secure as they move through the SUN process, and distilling these into global and contextually specific lessons, will help establish common knowledge systems, frameworks, and processes for accelerating progress in reducing maternal and child undernutrition. Improving nutrition is a critical development need. The SUN
movement has the potential to yield tremendous benefits for current and future generations of adults and children around the world. Securing high-level commitments to SUN requires convincing national leaders that bold nutrition targets can be met within a finite number of years. As the MDG deadlines near, one can expect an even greater drive to operationalize SUN within countries and at the global level and to scale up combined nutrition approaches.
For further reading: Scaling Up Nutrition: A Framework for Action, http://siteresources.worldbank. org/NUTRITION/Resources/281846-1131636806329/ PolicyBriefNutritionScalingUpApril.pdf; A Road Map for Scaling- Up Nutrition (SUN),
www.unscn.org/files/Announcements/Other_ announcements/FINAL_SUN_Road_Map_FINAL_dn.pdf; Scaling Up Nutrition: Progress Report from Countries and Their Partners in the Movement to Scale Up Nutrition (SUN),
www.scalingupnutrition. org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/111006-ENGLISH-SUN-Progress- Report-ROME-VERSION.pdf; Scaling Up Nutrition: Compendium of Country Fiches,
www.scalingupnutrition.org/wp-content/ uploads/2011/09/compendiurm-of-country-fiches-ROME-VERSION. pdf.
David Nabarro (
nabarro@un.org) is the special representative of the UN secretary-general for food security and nutrition, in Geneva, New York, and Rome. Purnima Menon (
p.menon@
cgiar.org) is a senior research fellow in the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Marie Ruel (
m.ruel@
cgiar.org) is the director of the Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division of IFPRI. Sivan Yosef (s.yosef@
cgiar.org) is a program manager in the Director General’s Office of IFPRI.
www.ifpri.org
Copyright © 2012 International Food Policy Research Institute. All rights reserved. Contact
ifpri-copyright@cgiar.org for permission to republish.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47