By Lawrence Haddad, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)
and Francesco Branca, World Health Organization (WHO)
The Challenge and the Opportunity
In its first year,
the Decade of Action for Nutrition has helped to generate a series of glorious
opportunities for stakeholders from all walks of life to expand and deepen
their commitments to advancing nutrition status. These opportunities will
play out across the world in the eight months between September 2017 and April
2018.
Citizens of all
countries would benefit from this intensification of intent and action. As
the Global Nutrition Report (GNR)
2016 notes,
three billion people are suffering from malnutrition in at least one of its
forms. Put simply, undernutrition is not declining fast enough while other
manifestations of malnutrition such as obesity and diabetes are rising rapidly.
Each of the opportunities
crystallises around an event designed to make it more impossible than ever to
ignore the challenge of malnutrition and more possible than ever to meet
it. The events are listed below. Each of these events will no doubt be
inspiring and illuminating. But will they amount to less or more than the sum
of their parts?
Stepping
Stone to A Decade of Impact for Nutrition
|
Key audience
|
Interest in nutrition
|
United Nations
General Assembly (UNGA) NY, September
|
UN Member
Governments (mainly Foreign ministries; some Health & Development
ministries), UN agencies
|
Indirect
|
CFS Rome, October
|
UN Member
Governments (mainly Agricultural ministries)
|
Direct
|
IUNS Buenos Aires, October
|
Researchers
|
Direct
|
G7 Milan, November
|
G7 Donors, WB, EU
(head of government level)
|
Direct
|
SUN GG Abidjan, November
|
SUN governments & networks
|
Direct
|
World Economic
Forum (WEF) Davos, January 2018
|
Businesses &
media & government (some heads of government)
|
Direct/Indirect
|
World Bank Spring
Meetings DC, April 2018
|
IFIs, ministries of Finance
|
Direct/Indirect
|
EAT Forum Stockholm, June 2018
|
Businesses
|
Direct
|
G20 Summit; Buenos
Aires; June or July 2018
|
Heads of Government
|
Probably Direct
|
UN High Level
Political Forum; July 2018
|
Foreign,
Development, some other ministries
|
Not clear
|
These opportunities
have to compound the gains that each one makes along the way. There needs to be
a steady and deliberate gathering of momentum for meaningful action. The need
to reduce the suffering of billions of people demands it.
What To Do?
The question is, how
to create stepping-stones out of these islands of engagement so that the Decade
of Action for Nutrition becomes a Decade of Maximum Impact for Nutrition?
The meetings are too
well defined to accommodate changes in themes at this stage, even if there was
a willingness to do so.
So what can be done
to maximise the impacts for nutrition? Imagine if the organisers of the
meetings could agree to do the following:
- Build momentum for action in three-four key
topics by picking up where the previous event left off on a given topic.
Candidates for topics? The G7 meeting will focus on food systems, women’s
empowerment and cities, and the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) gathering will have a focus on complex
emergencies. These issues will no doubt be raised at other fora—let’s link
the debates.
- Work with stakeholders across these fora to make
commitments to act in these and other areas, guided by the 60 or so action
areas in the Decade of Action’s Framework for Action. The commitments need
not be the SMARTest at first, these can be honed later on—they key is to
get public statements of intent on the table, to see what there is energy
for and what is missing. These commitments could kick start the
Decade for Action, with pledges to act.
This building of
momentum for action and the making of commitments for action would provide a
template for each year in the Decade of Action. Not every year will have
2017’s alignment of events – the Nutrition for Growth (N4G) and International Union of Nutritional
Sciences (IUNS) events
only happen once every three-four years-, but they will have a set that can be
built on at the global level. While the imperative is to convert energy
at the global level into national and subnational action, it is also important
to maintain the global energy. One way of feeding that energy is to provide
many examples of where actions are taking place on the ground and the effects
they are having.
How To Do It?
Who should do this?
There is no overarching lead group for nutrition—this is sometimes a strength
as it allows nutrition actions not to get stuck in top-down bureaucracy, but in
this case it is a weakness as no one group is worried about weaving together
all these golden strands of energy into a dazzling fabric that can support and
catapult nutrition efforts upwards.
A two track process
could be followed: (1) the organisers of each of these events could, this year
and every year, get together and coordinate some elements of their meetings and
(2) a light touch task force for the Decade of Action could be established
under the leadership of, say, the UN Deputy Secretary General to provide a focal point for the efforts of all
193 UN members and to stimulate greater coordination across major events within
a year and also across years to build dialogue and action to ensure the Decade
of Action for Nutrition delivers a Decade of Impact. Three
billion people are owed that much—and more.
Published 4 September 2017
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