EU4SUN boosts local support: Ecuador and El Salvador advance child nutrition in line with SUN 3.0 strategy

Good nutrition in the early years of a child's life is crucial for their growth, development and overall health. According to the World Health Organization, exclusive breastfeeding provides the optimal diet for infants, providing all the nutrients they need for the first six months after birth.

However, many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean face chronic malnutrition among younger children. In Ecuador, for instance, more than one in five children under 2 was chronically malnourished in the country in 2023, according to the National Survey of Child Malnutrition.

To address this, the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement works with the EU4SUN project to provide critical resources to mothers and young children throughout the region. EU4SUN, implemented by the Spanish Development entity FIIAPP and Expertise France, is one of the European Union’s primary contributions to the SUN Movement, working in countries throughout the world to scale up nutrition efforts.

In Ecuador, EU4SUN has been working closely with the Technical Secretariat “Ecuador Grows Without Chronic Child Undernutrition” and the Consultative Council for the Prevention and Reduction of Chronic Child Malnutrition to help the country’s territories better apply the national strategy for the prevention and reduction of child malnutrition. For example, the 2022 National Nutrition Plan calls for state-funded education on exclusive breastfeeding through six months of age, followed by additional education on continuous breastfeeding and complementary feeding until aged two.

Five meetings were held across Ecuador, the last in Quito in April , aimed at helping local leaders implement the National Plan to reduce child malnutrition. During the meetings, participants were oriented to the long term national policy for the prevention and reduction of chronic childhood malnutrition and discussed how it can be best implemented at local level, in light of very different contexts across the country. With help from the SUN Movement, stakeholders in Ecuador have united in the fight to scale up nutrition, including civil society organizations, members of academia and the business sector, media outlets and international cooperation organizations.

Meanwhile, in El Salvador, EU4SUN is currently supporting the implementation of the “Ley Amor Convertido en Alimento” (in English: Law Love Turned into Food) and its regulations in line with the plans, actions and projects of the National Nutrition Strategy. The aforementioned law aims to guarantee the right of all girls and boys to breastfeed through the adoption of measures that ensure an adequate environment and conditions to promote, protect and support breastfeeding, prioritizing the first thousand days of life and promoting safe and sufficient nutrition for children. This action contributes to the country's commitments made at the 2021 Tokyo Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit to reduce child malnutrition and increase exclusive breastfeeding in the first hour of a newborn's life.

EU4SUN is contributing to the training of 1,000 breastfeeding counselors (first level health care workers, community leaders and referents, staff of civil society and faith-based organizations and others). The Office of the First Lady, Gabriela Rodríguez de Bukele, who is a member of the SUN Lead Group, recently launched a breastfeeding website that provides mothers with breastfeeding advice and services, including information on how to breastfeed, the location of breastfeeding rooms and breast milk donation programmes. The website, which also includes legal and informational documents, is available online at https://www.salud.gob.sv/ley-amor/.