In the current global nutrition landscape, it is clear that nutrition financing continues to be unable to meet the scale of growing needs.
The 2024 World Bank Investment Framework for Nutrition indicated that $13 billion per year over the next 10 years is required to scale up nutrition interventions to address undernutrition globally.
This long-standing problem of inadequate nutrition financing has been attributed to a lack of prioritisation and significant challenges within the current global architecture for nutrition funding. In recent months, it has been further heightened by ODA cuts across the globe and the funding freeze at USAID in particular.
To better understand this long-standing issue and to inform efforts to catalyse investment in nutrition financing, World Vision International and the SDG2 Advocacy Hub conducted 19 key informant interviews to identify barriers to achieving long-term, predictable, accountable, and coherent donor investment in nutrition and explore solutions. The interviews informed the recommendations put forward by the authors in this report.
The in-depth interviews with key stakeholders conducted between May – September 2024 provided dynamic insights into challenges and opportunities. While each stakeholder offered a distinct perspective, there were several shared themes that support some common sense improvements to scale up and improve the impact of nutrition finance.
Voices of the key informant interviewees
“Nutrition will be a country priority when politicians are able to show return on investment within a political lifespan. So much of the ‘return on investment’ that we see in nutrition is not something any elected official will get to reap the benefits of. What they could reap the benefits from is improvement along process indicators that are globally accepted as being on the right path.”
“One of the biggest barriers is that the world has always seen nutrition as a niche area, as a small area that is dominated by ‘us nutritionists’ and we haven’t been able to break out of that tent we built for ourselves and be able to join hands with the wider development community.”
“If we really want to plan in the long term, [a first step] is a coherent approach and baselines at the national level to see where we are heading to. So, the national policy is a requirement and also national strategies that are really detailed where we can see the national vision, objectives, targets, and costing.”
“Unless you build the capacity and system to look at the budget in that way – where resources are, how much is going to nutrition, where and how it’s utilized at national and subnational levels – the normal budgeting system doesn’t allow that because it’s sectorally divided. Nobody really knows how much is spent on nutrition across sectors. So nobody knows, nobody pays attention to it, nobody improves.”
