Nutrition in the heart of international development

After travelling around the world, the Olympic flame made it to Paris, welcoming athletes and supporters for a summer of sportive competitions.

We have heard athletes championing messages on the importance of good health and nutritious diet, essential for achieving their goals. Nutrition is indeed essential for living a healthy live, to fight against diseases, and elevating our physical and mental health. But having a healthy diet isn’t something only Olympic champions need, and nutrition should not be a luxury.

Access to nutritious food is an essential human need and has been acknowledged by international law as a fundamental human right. However, in 2024, as more than 2.8 billion people worldwide can’t afford a healthy diet, good nutrition outcomes seem unachievable for millions of people suffering from malnutrition.

The Nutrition for Growth Summit

In 2013, while hosting the Olympic Games, the UK government recognised the need to address one of the many injustices still persisting in the world: global malnutrition. On the side of the Olympics, the UK hosted the first Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit, aimed at mobilising governments, donors, civil society, and many other stakeholders with the goal to tackle malnutrition by 2030. Since 2013, Olympic hosting countries have shown a commitment to keep the N4G process and to host the Summit. By receiving the torch of the Olympic flame, the French government has taken its turn, and officially announced that the next N4G Summit will take place in Paris in March 2025.

The contrast between the Olympic Games and the N4G Summit is symbolic. It raises one of the most important questions related to global inequalities: why, in a world capable of producing massive wealth, are millions of children still dying from a lack of nutritious food? Malnutrition is preventable, and depends on the political will to address this multi-layer issue with policy plans, and to disburse enough finances.

This is why the N4G process has been created: to mobilise policy commitments and financial pledges to tackle global malnutrition. Engaging in the N4G process, making ambitious pledges and showing accountability in their delivery is the most concrete action that governments can take to show commitment to the nutrition agenda.

What does it take to tackle global malnutrition?

Understanding malnutrition is key. Good nutrition isn’t only about sufficient food, but the right amount of nutritious food, fulfilling specific needs of different groups of individuals. Women and adolescent girls, for instance, are particularly vulnerable to nutritional deficiencies due to physiological factors: menstruation and pregnancy mean that women have additional nutritional requirements, such as higher need of iron-rich foods. Pregnant women, older people and children have also specific nutritious needs, which must be fulfilled to avoid the worse forms of undernutrition, such as child wasting.

Tackling malnutrition requires setting measures in many different sectors and domains, for instance health systems and social protection. It also involves rethinking our food systems and our global economy, as poverty and lack of resources are one of the main drivers of malnutrition. Given the impact of gender inequalities, conflicts and climate on nutrition, tackling malnutrition also means addressing all the political, economic and social determinants of malnutrition at all levels. And this is why nutrition must be a central pillar to international development.

What should the UK government do ahead of the next N4G Summit?

In their Declaration, Civil Societies from the Global South have stated what needs to be prioritised in the run up to the N4G Summit:

• Including civil society organisations and local communities in decision making.
• Integrating nutrition across all relevant development sectors’ programmes and policies.
• Commitments from governments and donors to accountability and transparency.

To meaningfully integrate what is needed in the response to the malnutrition crisis, governments must demonstrate high political will at the next N4G Summit by committing to political changes and  backing-up their promises with financial pledges.

The UK government has been a long-standing champion of the N4G process and the fight against malnutrition. Unfortunately, the cut to Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 2021 has significantly and disproportionately affected malnutrition programmes from the FCDO, as demonstrated in the Stocktake analysis of the ICAN UK coalition. However, by hosting the 2023 Global Food Security Summit, the FCDO has played a positive role to address the malnutrition and hunger crises.

The new Labour government must place nutrition at the heart of the FCDO agenda, and commit to funding nutrition programmes in order to support global efforts in eradicating malnutrition. With the ICAN UK coalition, we recommend that the FCDO should make the following commitments at the Summit:

1. Commit to invest at least £500 million in nutrition-specific programmes between 2025-2030.
2. Maximise impact of spending in other key areas like health, agriculture and climate by ensuring at least £2.5 billion of ODA is nutrition-sensitive between 2025-2030.
3. Set an ambition to reach at least 50 million children, women and adolescent girls with nutrition related interventions by 2030 and report yearly on how many people are reached with nutrition-specific interventions.
4. Integrate nutrition across development sectors, to make meaningful progress in tackling the underlying causes of malnutrition. This includes setting ambitious targets for integrating nutrition across climate, agriculture, health, WASH and social protection; and to increase nutrition-sensitive spending in these sectors in line with previous best practice.^[1]
5. Put gender equality at the heart of nutrition programmes by ensuring that at least 90% of nutrition spending is gender-sensitive.
6. Build on the UK’s nutrition policy expertise by partnering with governments and research institutions to fund research in key areas such as preventing malnutrition, child wasting, adolescent nutrition and immunisation-nutrition integration.
7. Lead global accountability efforts by funding the Global Nutrition Report to enhance the Nutrition Accountability Framework, a critical tool to ensure governments follow through on their N4G commitments.
8. Strengthen partnerships with local civil society organisations so they can advocate for nutrition to their governments. Embed an advocacy component within FCDO nutrition programmes and commit to fund the Scaling Up Nutrition Civil Society Network.

In the run up to the N4G Summit, the new Labour government has an opportunity to scale up its response to the global malnutrition crisis that aggravates poverty and inequalities. We urge the UK government to make its commitment against malnutrition as ambitious as possible to fulfil the agenda of the French government for the Summit, and place nutrition at the heart of international development.

^[1] For the period 2019-22, the highest levels of nutrition-sensitive spend recorded in these sectors was 11% in health, 22% in agriculture, 14% in WASH and 16% in social services. The highest levels of nutrition-related spend in International Climate Finance was 7%.