Launch of the Second Global Nutrition Report

22 September 2015. New York. The Global Nutrition Report (IFPRI, 201 pages) is the first comprehensive summary and scorecard on both global and country level progress on all forms of nutrition for 193 countries.

The 2015 edition builds and reflect on new opportunities, actions, progress, accountability, and data for nutrition, with the aim to build greater commitment to improved nutrition in all countries.

New findings and recommendations include:

• The critical relationship between climate change and nutrition
• Focus on the roles of business and how it can play a pivotal role
• Fresh data covering all forms of malnutrition – from under nutrition in young children to nutrition-related noncommunicable diseases in adults, and from stunting to obesity

Financial support for this report was provided by 1,000 Days, the Bill & Melinda, Gates Foundation, the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, the Children’s Investment

Fund Foundation, the European Commission, the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, the Government of Canada, the Government of the Netherlands, Irish Aid, the United States Agency for International Development, and the UK Department for International Development.

Extract:

Given that most, if not all, countries lack the resources to fully and immediately scale up all interventions, the analysis considers various more modest scale-up scenarios: (1) focusing on only the regions with the highest burden of malnutrition, (2) scaling up only a subset of interventions, and (3) scaling up a subset of interventions only in the regions with the highest burden of malnutrition. It finds that the most cost-effective scenario is to scale up a subset of the 10 interventions in the highest-burden regions of the country. This scenario is between 1.5 and 3.3 times more cost-effective than scaling up all 10 interventions nationwide. (page 69)

Aflatoxin control in high-aflatoxin areas may be cost-effective investments through the education and agriculture sectors. However, evidence for the impact of nutrition-sensitive interventions is less conclusive than evidence for nutrition-specific ones. This analysis of costs and benefits is thus preliminary and points to the need for more robust data on nutrition-sensitive interventions to inform future priorities for scaling up. (page 155)

Lawrence Haddad, IFPRI (presentation of the report)

Tom Arnauld, Scaling up nutrition

Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Singer, songwriter, entrepreneur South Africa

Graça Machel, Politician and Humanitarian Mozambique

Joy Phumaphi, African Leaders Malaria Alliance 

Ertharin Cousin, Executive Director, United Nations World Food Programme