An Investment Framework for Nutrition: Reaching the global targets for stunting, anemia, breastfeeding, and wasting

As of 2015, 159 million children under the age of five were chronically malnourished or stunted, underscoring a massive global health and economic development challenge (UNICEF, WHO, and World Bank 2015). In 2012—in an effort to rally the international community around improving nutrition—the 176 members of the World Health Assembly endorsed the first-ever global nutrition targets, focusing on six areas: stunting, anemia, low birthweight, childhood overweight, breastfeeding, and wasting. These targets aim to boost investments in cost-effective interventions, spearhead better implementation practices, and catalyze progress toward decreasing malnutrition. Some of the targets (stunting and wasting) are further enshrined within the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2), which commits to ending malnutrition in all its forms by the year 2030.

Ending malnutrition is critical for economic and human development. Childhood stunting, an overarching measure of long-term malnutrition, has life-long consequences not just for health, but also for human capital and economic development, prosperity, and equity. Thus nutrition interventions are consistently identified as one of the most cost-effective development actions.

Although the investment case for nutrition is strong, efforts to reach the nutrition SDG targets are constrained by a range of factors including insufficient financing, complexity in terms of implementation, and determining the methods and costs involved in monitoring SDG targets. This report aims to close this knowledge gap by providing a more comprehensive estimate of costs as well as financing needs, linking them both to expected impacts, and laying out a potential financing framework. An in-depth understanding of current nutrition investments, future needs and their impacts, and ways to mobilize the required funds is included to move the agenda from a political commitment to a policy imperative.

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