Image
 UN0315969-Pirozzi.jpg

The SUN Movement Pooled Fund

The SUN Movement Pooled Fund is a grant programme that was established in 2017 to provide funding to SUN countries to support their efforts to end malnutrition in all its forms.

Under the stewardship of the SUN Movement, the programme is hosted by the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS)

Core focus

The Pooled Fund supports the delivery of the SUN Movement Strategy and Roadmap 2016–2020, and in SUN countries it focuses on:

Sustaining advocacy

efforts to keep nutrition as a national development priority

Strengthening

participatory national nutrition governance

Jointly implementing

national multi-sectoral nutrition plans

Increasing capabilities

of nutrition actors at national and subnational levels.

Funding windows

Grants are managed by UNOPS and are allocated to selected SUN country projects according to specific eligibility criteria and through open, transparent and competitive calls. As at 2020, the SUN Movement Pooled Fund totalled approximately USD 18.5 million.

The Pooled Fund supports the efforts of multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral platforms in SUN countries through two funding windows, reflecting its two primary areas of work.

Window 1 aims to build, or strengthen, the participation of non-state stakeholders in national multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral platforms. Its beneficiaries are national Civil Society Alliances and national business networks.

Four calls have been launched under Window 1.

Window 2 aims to accelerate the coordinated delivery of high-impact nutrition activities by members of multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral platforms at national and subnational levels, encouraging cooperation across core areas, through sharing and learning, to increase impact.

One call was launched under Window 2.

Who benefits from the Pooled Fund?

To date, 65 organizations in 44 countries have received, or are receiving, grants aimed at:

  • providing them with the opportunity, tools and know-how to ensure better multi-stakeholder coordination in their countries
  • enabling the voices of every important nutrition stakeholder to be heard at the decision-making and policy design tables
  • and, most importantly, allowing these organizations to join forces, building on each other’s strengths, to achieve common nationally owned objectives and targets, in order to ensure that no community is left malnourished and behind.

Core values

The Pooled Fund’s work reflects its three core values:

Catalytic

Innovative

Sustainable

 

The Pooled Fund provides support that is designed to consolidate capacities and trigger structural change in order to bring about bigger scale and lasting change. Selected projects support national nutrition networks and actors to deliver jointly, for the results to be more than the sum of their parts. An important part of projects is to inspire other interested parties to undertake nutrition-related actions, build synergies, consolidate progress and scale up successful activities. The Pooled Fund plays a catalytic role in ensuring that organized cooperation between stakeholders and peer-to-peer learning for enhanced capacities remain a high priority in all the grant cycles.

The Pooled Fund seeks to identify and cultivate innovative activities at the national and subnational levels. In SUN countries, the grants are provided as last-resort funding, adding value to partners’ activities and preventing any duplication with ongoing projects. These activities should be innovative in their nature or approach and spark the interest of other organizations in working together on nutrition actions that previously did not exist, that are new to a particular geographic area or group, or by improving a model or approach that already exists.

The Pooled Fund places sustainability at its core. Selected projects are designed to ensure that activities and institutions will eventually outlive the short-term duration of the grants.

The grants serve to consolidate national networks and achieve the critical mass, capacity, experience, impact and recognition required to be acknowledged and further supported by traditional development partners. Grants that support national networks place a strong emphasis on developing sustainability strategies and fundraising capacities. They are also used to pilot and demonstrate the impact of effective interventions, to be scaled up by national decision-makers.

The focus at the subnational level is particularly important in providing a link between the needs of communities on the one hand, and government policies and plans on the other. It ensures that communities’ voices are heard, that nutrition is embedded in both national and subnational agendas over the long term, and that plans deliver the expected results.