NUTRITION IS CENTRAL TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
These features of nutrition—its global prevalence, the need to improve it through broad alliances of sectors, and its short- and long-term consequences—also define other current develop- ment challenges: achieving equity, facilitating demographic transitions to lower mortality and fertility levels, and addressing climate change and its implications for vulnerability, sustainable food systems, and natural resource use. The process of improv- ing nutrition outcomes has a kinship with these issues and is central to the sustainable development agenda in at least two ways. First, nutrition improvements are inherently sustaining over time. Investments in the first 1,000 days of a person’s life yield benefits throughout that person’s life cycle and across generations.2
for their actions or inaction in improving nutrition. In so doing, the report seeks to support the SDG accountability infrastruc- ture and to serve as a spur to improved resource allocation and to intensified action and demand for good nutrition.
The key audiences are current “nutrition champions” and
Second, improvements in nutritional status will drive many sustainable development outcomes—directly and in- directly. As Chapter 2 will show, improved nutrition contributes to most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the UN’s Open Working Group. It is clear that improvements in nutrition can help drive the SDG agenda.
THE NEED TO STRENGTHEN NUTRITION ACCOUNTABILITY
While these aspects of nutrition make it central to sustainable development, they also make it difficult to hold key stakehold- ers accountable for their actions to improve it. How do individ- uals make claims on those responsible for improving nutrition if they cannot identify those responsible, cannot identify their duties, and cannot track whether they are fulfilling those responsibilities? Similarly those responsible for nutrition- improving actions will have trouble tracking the progress of their own efforts if tracking and feedback mechanisms are weak. The large number of actors, the long-term benefits to action, and the invisibility of some consequences of malnutri- tion all work against strong accountability. Without nutrition accountability, there is no guide to action and no consequence to inaction and indifference—other than to the 2 to 3 billion people directly affected.
Our knowledge of which actions can improve nutrition sta- tus has never been greater. For undernutrition, we can call on a set of proven, specific interventions and a set of much larger nutrition-sensitive investments that have enormous untapped potential. For overweight and obesity, the evidence base is weaker but getting stronger. Evidence suggests that addressing undernutrition also mitigates some of the risk factors associated with noncommunicable diseases later in life. In the absence of data, issues remain of how to sequence and prioritize actions and how to assess whether the actions are making a difference at the meso and macro levels.
AIMS OF THIS REPORT
This report represents a new contribution to strengthen the ability of policymakers, program implementers, civil society advocates, investors, communities, and families to monitor their society’s progress in improving nutrition. The aim of the report is to help these groups hold themselves, and others, to account
their current and future allies (Table 1.1). Nutrition champions are organizations and individuals, operating in the spotlight or behind the scenes, who consistently strive to accelerate improvements in nutrition outcomes. Their allies are those who work with the champions because they have an interest in investing in nutrition, typically to further another goal—in conjunction with, or because of, efforts to improve nutrition. Future champions are those whom we need to inspire and support, who are starting out in their nutrition careers, or who are discovering nutrition. Future allies are those who have vested interests in nutrition but may not yet realize it. They are the economists searching for new sources of growth; the social planners looking for new ways of reaching the most vulnerable; the agriculturalists seeking to maximize the human impacts of farm technologies, practices, and market innovations; and the water, sanitation, and hygiene specialists looking to maximize the health benefits of their work. Reaching and motivating these strategic partners will lead to new dialogues and should identify new opportunities for investments that lead to improve- ments in nutrition.
The report was originally called for by the signatories of the Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit Compact in 2013 in recog- nition of the need to better monitor commitments to improving nutrition. As such, the report is a collective endeavor of a set of N4G stakeholders who care deeply about improving nutrition as a spur to sustainable development.
The Stakeholder Group has empowered an Independent Ex-
pert Group to bring together existing and new nutrition data to provide a more complete picture of country and global nutrition indicators, strengthen accountability, generate fresh insights, start new conversations, and catalyze new actions.
These two groups, like many others, recognize that although the political commitment to improve nutrition is currently high, it is not permanent. Development trends come and go. This report aims to be a legacy of current high levels of commitment and to help stimulate future waves of commit- ment to nutrition long after the current wave has dissipated.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
The report broadly follows the framework for actions to im- prove nutrition status shown in Black et al. (2013). It describes the importance of improved nutrition status, progress in improv- ing nutrition status, and coverage levels and trends in nutri- tion-specific and nutrition-sensitive programs and approaches, including investments in the underlying determinants that support them (see Panel 1.1). It examines the enabling environ- ment for nutrition—resources, policies, laws, and institutional transformations—and identifies bottlenecks to progress and opportunities for stakeholders to come together.
ACTIONS & ACCOUNTABILITY TO ACCELERATE THE WORLD’S PROGRESS ON NUTRITION 3
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 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118