New Save the Children reports stress the importance of sustainable financing for nutrition

The scale of the challenge in tackling child malnutrition is undeniable. Millions of children are malnourished because of who they are and where they live, and progress remains far too slow – the world is not spending anywhere near enough to deliver the change that we need. To illuminate this, in April 2018, Save the Children released two policy briefs, Nutrition Boost and The Global Financing Facility stressing the importance of scaling up nutrition and the centrality of national nutrition plans for all countries with high-burdens of malnutrition.

Nutrition Boost: Why the world needs a step change in finance for nutrition – and how it can be achieved

[…] at a minimum, an additional $23.25 billion is required per year to meet the challenge of SDG212 –more than three times the $7 billion that the World Bank Investment Framework suggests.” – Nutrition Boost

New calculations from Save the Children conclude that the resources required, to achieve SDG 2, are far beyond the capabilities of the current funding paradigm.

The Nutrition Boost policy briefing makes the case for a new funding paradigm that will:

• prioritise domestic resource mobilisation, focused on the most basic needs, and driven by widening the revenue base through progressive tax reform.
• focus the official development assistance on the most excluded children, and on catalyzing new domestic resources.
• scale up innovative financing mechanisms through expansion and reform of existing mechanisms, such as the Global Financing Facility and Power of Nutrition, and through the creation of an enabling environment for new mechanisms to emerge.

The diversification of nutrition financing sources should abide by four pillars:

• Supporting and funding national nutrition plans: these plans are the key to delivering sustainable, country-driven change, and offer a costed, multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder strategy that identifies where funding is needed in the local context and the size of the local funding gap.
• Equity: nutrition financing must prioritise the ‘Leave No One Behind’ agenda.
• Transparency and accountability: all nutrition financing must be transparent and accountable, both domestically, through the timely release of allocations and disbursement, and globally, through the tracking of aid flows and pledges.
• Bridging the humanitarian/development divide: investment in flexible and shock responsive nutrition development work needs to be allied with sustained post-humanitarian response funding to lock in developmental gains and mitigate against recurrence.

Download the report: English

Learn more about how SUN governments track their nutrition investments 

Learn more about the global cost of nutrition interventions

The Global Financing Facility: An opportunity to get it right

The Global Financing Facility (GFF) policy brief reviews the GFF, it’s theory of change, and its performance since its inception in 2015. Save the Children supports the 2018 replenishment but calls on all governments and civil society to make the GFF transformational by implementing the reforms suggested in this paper, and thereby building adequate, equitable and sustainable financing for health systems.

Recommendations:

• The GFF must be genuinely transformational in assisting governments to develop effective and holistic approaches to generating increased and sustainable domestic resources for health systems, underpinned by accountable health financing strategies, and fully costed national health and nutrition plans.
• The GFF must protect recipient countries from bad or unsustainable debt through diligent use of indebtedness protection controls, and employ additional controls and caution for private sector finance.
• The GFF must continue to ensure that the services and activities it supports promote universal access to the comprehensive reproductive, maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and nutrition ‘continuum of care’ principally through primary healthcare.
• The GFF needs to allow civil society to play a full and effective accountability role by increasing transparency, access, and financial support to civil society at all levels.

Download the report: English

Learn more about the Global Financing Facility :

Global Financing Facility 2018 Replenishment

“Emerging Financing Mechanisms: where is the value for nutrition? A Specific Focus on the Global Financing Facility (GFF)”