Budget

Intro

Improving children’s nutrition boosts productivity and contributes to lift individuals, families and nations out of poverty. Addressing and preventing malnutrition in children enhances human capital, impacting long term educational achievements, employability, labour productivity, health and wellbeing, economic growth, and sustainable development, therefore contributing to lifting individuals, families and nations out of poverty.

Good nutrition helps break the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition, poverty and disadvantage, and supports equity and inclusion.

Investing in nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive programmes will benefit multiple sectors, and bring both short and long-term economic benefits - nutrition outcomes are used as an indicator to measure socio-economic wellbeing.

Why

Why the sector needs to get involved

• Investing in nutrition is a smart investment. According to the World Bank¹⁸, for every $1 invested in nutrition, $16 is returned to the local economy.
• Investing in improving nutrition has a multiplier effect and helps to address not only SDG2 but all the SDGs. Improved nutrition outcomes are interconnected to improvements in the population’s health and wellbeing, education, workforce productivity, and economic contribution, and the overall level of development of a country: Nutrition outcomes are a key marker of sustainable development.
• Governments that commit to finance an enhanced proportion of these nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive actions from their national budgets will be more likely to leverage financing from partners.
• Failure to protect the nutrition of mothers, infants and young children in the first 1,000 days of life will compromise human capital.  

Key asks

• Allocate significant domestic resources to nutrition, as per the financing nutrition resource mobilization strategies, to meet international commitments, including those made at the Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit, included in the Nationally-Determined Contributions (NDCs), and the National Food Systems Transformation Pathways.
• Allocate funding for quality, large scale evaluations of nutrition evidence-based activities and approaches.
• Prepare investable business cases and identify suitable capital providers, financing structures, intermediaries and financing instruments to help fund national nutrition plans.
• Map out current and future public and private funding flows and investment capital and support the development of evidence-based financing plans.
• Target both traditional and non-traditional (i.e. innovative) funding sources and partners to leverage additional funding for nutrition actions.