Aid for Nutrition, a specific focus on the Global Financing Facility mechanism

October 2, 2017 - Last update: February 10, 2023

On September 2017, Action Against Hunger presented the report “Emerging Financing Mechanisms: where is the value for nutrition? A Specific Focus on the Global Financing Facility (GFF)”. The report is the fourth report in Action Against Hunger’s Aid for Nutrition series. This fourth report of the Aid for Nutrition series follows two side events organized by Action Against Hunger and its partners on the topic of innovative financing mechanisms, first during the Civil Society Policy Forum in the margins of the WB/IMF Annual meetings in October 2016, then during the World Bank Spring meetings in 2017.

In recent years, three new financing mechanisms with a nutrition focus have been launched: the Global Financing Facility (GFF), Power of Nutrition and UNITLIFE (with the GFF being the most advanced mechanism). To scale up nutrition interventions, it is critically important to increase nutrition funding, and the GFF is a great opportunity to this end.

From the analysis conducted as part of this report, the GFF seems to be including nutrition activities in all approved projects to date, and most projects are including nutrition in their results frameworks (e.g. objectives and/or indicators). However, the degree of nutrition focus in GFF projects varies significantly; and it is not possible to accurately estimate the level of GFF financing directed towards nutrition, based on available documentation.

The GFF has significant potential for making important contributions to nutrition in the coming years. Civil Society will be an important partner in helping the GFF to realize that potential. This will include its roles at country level as implementer and technical partner; and its roles more broadly advocacy, accountability, transparency and governance. Civil Society has the opportunity to leverage these roles to help ensure the robustness of the GFF’s investments and processes, and the GFF’s focus on nutrition and vulnerable populations; and to help drive the strategic direction of the GFF and the on-going refinements of its business model.

The report aims to assess how the emerging innovative financing mechanisms (and more specifically the GFF) can help fill the nutrition-financing gap. It presents:

• A high-level overview of the financing landscape for nutrition: the different domestic and external sources of nutrition financing, including new developments and trends in nutrition financing.

• An analysis of early experiences with the GFF which reviews the early investments made by the Global Financing Facility (the GFF), to understand better how it is supporting nutrition efforts in countries

• A discussion of opportunities for civil society (at both national and international levels) to support the GFF, as well as new nutrition financing mechanisms more broadly.

• Specific recommendations to the World Bank task team leaders (at international, regional and national levels), the Investor Group, governments of high burden countries as well as donors.