The below transcript has been edited for clarity and readability
COVID-19, climate change and conflicts are worsening global malnutrition in all of its forms and reversing a decade of progress. Here's the stark reality:
800 million people go hungry daily
2 billion barely eat enough for a healthy life
Over 3 billion can't afford nutritious diets
Children and women suffer the most
150 million children under five are stunted
45 million are wasted and frail
And 37 million are overweight
Women face severe malnutrition, eating last and at least. Half of women aged 15 to 49 suffer from anaemia, making them tired and weak. Many countries battle a triple burden of malnutrition, and infectious and chronic diseases, destabilising health systems and slowing economic growth. Malnutrition is a global issue affecting both rich and poor nations. To change this, we must revamp our approach to malnutrition and food systems.
So what are the interventions and innovations needed to tackle global malnutrition? What political and policy commitments are required and who will be footing the bill? How can the global community ensure that the United Nations’ 2030 nutrition targets stay a priority? How can key players ensure equal access to healthier diets? The Nutrition for Growth Summit or N4G will provide the answers.
On March 27th and 28, 2025, France will host the N4G, uniting governments, businesses, civil society, development agencies, philanthropies and academia with one goal to strengthen collective action against malnutrition. Investing in nutrition fosters societal growth and builds resilience to disease, and returns are significant. Every dollar invested in nutrition returned $16 to the local economy. The N4G Paris aims to shift mindsets so that nutrition is seen as an indispensable component of sustainable development, essential for human and planetary well-being. Not a nice to have, but a must-have. N4G will be a platform for sharing successes and solutions and building commitments for nutrition, for growth and nutrition, for good!
Shiulie Ghosh: Hello, everyone. And a warm welcome to you all. Thank you for joining us for this special edition of our interview series. As we look ahead to the Nutrition for Growth Summit in March next year. Well, as you've seen from the opening video there, the global levels of malnutrition and hunger are affecting billions of people worldwide. We have seen worrying trends across all levels of nutrition, from hunger to obesity. And those levels have really got worse following the Covid pandemic. Despite commitments from member states to eradicate world hunger by 2030, we continue to fall short of the minimum standards for healthy and sustainable diets. So during this discussion, we're going to look at what we're expecting from global leaders during the N4G summit. What kind of commitments we want to see. How we can mobilize the international community around the issue of nutrition, how we can bring in the private sector and civil society, and how we can get really back on track to fulfil the UN's sustainable development agenda. So I am delighted to have with me three excellent speakers who have been instrumental in driving global efforts to engage stakeholders, to change mindsets and to make healthier diets more accessible for everyone. So let me introduce them to you. We have Brieuc Pont, France's special envoy on nutrition and secretary general of the Nutrition for Growth Summit. Afshan Khan, Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and also coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition, the SUN movement, and Lawrence Haddad, Executive Director of GAIN, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you, to all my speakers for joining me. I'm just going to spend a little bit of time with each of you to get the lay of the land, as it were. And, Brieuc, let me start with you because France is very much taking a leading role in the issue of nutrition is of course hosting the Nutrition for Growth Summit next year.
In your opinion, what are the major priorities for addressing malnutrition and hunger on a global scale?
Brieuc Pont: What do you see? Thank you for having me with you today, Shiulie. The main priorities on nutrition are many, in fact. But let's look at one figure. We know that one person dies every four seconds of starvation or hunger-related pathologies. And we also know that half of the children's deaths every year are caused by malnutrition.
So this this is basically our priorities to fight this scourge of malnutrition. And we know that, nutrition-focused development policies are super-efficient and help us build up and build, foster the resilience of local communities and then build up on that and, and continue with, proceed with development policies that make, a development much more efficient. So we don't have to patch the same problem every year. So this is really our priority is to get the international community moving on.
Shiulie Ghosh: And really, nutrition is fundamental to those sustainable development goals that the UN have come up, and have put in place. It really cuts across all those different issues. Just put it into context for us. What's at stake here? How fundamental is nutrition to that vision we all aspire to of a healthier, more prosperous, more sustainable world?
Brieuc Pont: When we look at nutrition, we should not see something which is strictly specific to food. Specific, if you like. This is something that is intertwined with many, many other issues. That is cross-cutting, transversal, holistic, you name it. This is a policy that can address a number of problems that humanity is dealing with.
And, we know that nutrition basically, specifically, relates to SDGs 2 and 3, that is, zero hunger and good health and well-being. But we also know that it impacts 11 out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). So when you implement a nutrition development policy, you know that you are making a difference in so many different issues such as health, food systems, climate change, humanitarian affairs, crisis, and resilience, which shows how impactful, how efficient this is.
And it compares, you know, malnutrition itself, compares with many other inequalities. And I'm speaking of the gender gap. We know that women and girls are much more impacted by, affected by malnutrition. And so many, many fields of actions are impacted by the development policy through nutrition, which is extremely profitable. The return on investment, the financial impact is very high. We know that it's a factor of 16 when you invest $100 million or euros in nutrition, you get 1.6 billion back in GDP. So nutrition also helps local economies thrive. And we believe this is really key for a long-lasting and sustainable development policy.
Shiulie Ghosh: Yeah. And I think that that point about return on investment is going to be a very persuasive one for a lot of policymakers. One of the things that N4G really wants to emphasize is the power of collaboration. And we know that collaboration between different sectors and different stakeholders is really key to making some of these solutions workable. What kind of innovative partnerships are you really hoping to see?
Brieuc Pont: Well, we do not pretend to reinvent the wheel, but we have a diplomatic tradition in France which is to be open to civil society. And we do not believe in the top-down approach. We need to get, you know, feedback from the field. And those who actually bring back the dust back from the field can give us the data, the good impressions, the good knowledge they got locally, which is why we are collaborating with not only the Scaling Up Nutrition movement and its fantastic network of governments, philanthropies, businesses, and of NGOs.
Shiulie Ghosh: So this is nothing but good practice. Solutions that you can scale up.
Brieuc Pont: And the idea is also to bring them into the governance of the summit, which is why we are really looking forward to the work with, in particular the civil society in the summit governance and for the first time ever, the steering committee itself includes civil society organisations.
So we think it's very important to get the voice and the experience. Also, we have identified a number of occasions where we can beat the drum and try to leverage support in the international community. That would be, I was, last week at the high-level forum at the United Nations.
We will be back in New York in September for the United Nations General Assembly's opening week. There is also the full meetings at the World Bank, many other moments, G7, and G20 meetings and of course, the SUN global gathering in Kigali in November will be a great occasion to beat the drum and make noise and get everyone on board.
Shiulie Ghosh: Well, it's great that there seems to be so much momentum in the right direction for the moment. So thank you very much indeed for that. And that is a great moment to bring in Afshan, as coordinator of the SUN movement, you've got 66 countries across Latin America, Asia, and Africa all trying, working together to try and improve their food systems and their levels of nutrition. Where have you seen most success with that?
Afshan Khan: Thanks so much for the question, Shiulie. And I think what I've seen is exponential growth also in the number of SUN partners over the last decade. So we went from, say, being in 13 countries in 2013 to over 4,000 organisations across 52 countries. And a dozen in development by 2024. So civil society has played a very important role.
We've also seen the SUN Business Network and the small and medium enterprises, led by GAIN and World Food Programme (WFP) together as a really important factor and component in driving home the nutrition agenda. So I would say we've really seen proven solutions, brokered and supported from the networks. These include things like integrating nutrition and immunisation together through strengthened primary health care.
Working with GAVI and WHO, SUN has targeted zero-dose children with nutrition services delivered through primary health care. And we've seen this in several SUN countries: DRC, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan. So Brieuc spoke well about, you know, I think a couple of sectors that are pivotal to nutrition outcomes. Clearly health is one, but the other is also food systems. So, you know, breastfeeding for me can clearly cut the chances of a child becoming obese by up to 25%. And we're seeing overall rates increase.
Shiulie Ghosh: And that's one of the things that has really been pushed in some of these particularly low-middle-income countries about the importance of things like breastfeeding. But it comes to a good, nutritious start in life.
Afshan Khan: Absolutely. And for that first thousand days, it's critical. So we've really seen also El Salvador, for example, has increased the number of breastfeeding counsellors by more than a thousand. So these investments that are being made by governments I would include social protection where Bangladesh has supported a household scheme that looks at a monthly stipend, which is increased by 25%.
It's that families spend the stipend on healthy foods. So those incentives to really focus on nutritious food and healthy diets is key. And we've seen it in the school meals, school feeding programme as well. So there in Sri Lanka, the national school feeding program, funded by WFP, has really focused on providing school-age children with nutritious food that's locally procured.
And again, creating this virtuous cycle of nutritious, quality food being procured by government locally. So we create incentives for local producers of quality, nutritious food, and then offering resources and employment to families to provide support in those canteens and work in those school canteens. So there's lots of opportunities there through the SUN movement and its stakeholders and partners, to really accelerate the nutrition agenda in a meaningful way.
And I think as we're dealing more and more with all forms of malnutrition, we have to look at some of the nutrition labelling policies to inform consumers about the nutritional value of foods. So, for example, Zambia, the Good Food Logo is allowing consumers to make healthy choices. But it's really important that we also have food environments that are healthy and those are supported by public policies.
By changes in consumer behaviour, but also changes in behaviour of what's being supplied on the domestic market. So there's linkages between several sectors. And maybe the last thing I would say is the important link with climate, because here we see that there's real opportunities both to improve how food systems are impacting on the climate, but also how nutritious and healthy diets that include indigenous crops, locally sourced foods for public procurement can also impact on emissions. And I think we should speak about that a little more
Shiulie Ghosh: Yeah. We will definitely be talking about how nutrition links in with other global issues. I just want to pick up on some of the things that you've mentioned. Really interesting initiatives and clearly very successful initiatives from a grassroots level up to higher levels. Can we talk a little bit about money, though? Financing is always a problem for all countries, but in particular for low and middle-income countries. So how are some countries funding their nutrition initiatives?
Afshan Khan: Access to finance for nutrition programming is frequently raised by some countries because its absence creates major bottlenecks in the design and rollout of these multisectoral interventions. So I think there are a few key things that can be done. First of all, SUN has been supporting the cost of national nutrition plans. And then, I think we can optimise what is the domestic budget that's going towards nutrition financing across all the key sectors because we know that nutrition outcomes, as I said earlier, are emanating from multiple sectors.
So that's one: what's the domestic budget that's going towards nutrition, and can we earmark and tag that? There have been some very successful examples of that kind of budget monitoring. The second is really to look at how is ODA and grant assistance being channelled. And there again, I think having the donor networks in-country, led by some donor networks and sometimes alongside UN agencies, gives the opportunity to make sure that the bilateral assistance is also supporting the right areas.
And we have seen that there's a big financing gap in nutrition. The estimates are that less than 1% of ODA goes towards direct nutrition interventions. So there's much more to be done. Then the third area, and one that is likely to grow, and I hope with Blair's support as well, is the concessional financing that's available to nutrition. In the current funding environment, we are going to need to see the banks through IDA and the regional banks step up their financing for nutrition.
There's clearly been some. We've seen the African Development Bank, for example, make a commitment to increase the portfolio of investment going towards nutrition direct and nutrition-sensitive interventions, and clearly much more can be done. Lastly, I think there's opportunities for more innovative financing, public-private partnerships, better use of philanthropies to shore up some of the risks of supporting nutrition interventions, some complementary financing, and perhaps even looking at climate financing to see what they can do around supporting investments in nutrition that can lead to better climate-sensitive outcomes as well. So there's a lot of opportunity, but we really need to up our game to meet some of the financing gaps that have so clearly been demonstrated.
Shiulie Ghosh: Yeah. And I'm sure that's something that we'll talk about in the wider discussion as well, for the moment. Afshan, thank you very much indeed for that. Lawrence, if I can turn to you, we are well on the road to 2030 now. We've seen commitments from governments. We've heard some of the fantastic work that is happening in the SUN countries there from Afshan. Where have we seen progress and where do we still have a lot to do?
Lawrence Haddad: Okay. So, thanks, Shiulie. And thanks to Brieuc, Afshan for bringing up some really interesting comments. I think you mentioned COVID. Surely, and COVID really pulled back the curtain a bit on some of the things that we perhaps take for granted but shouldn't. And I think parents know, for example, that school meals are really important for their kids' nutrition.
But when our kids stop going to school, teachers stop going to school. Everyone really saw the real importance of school and school meals and school feeding in the UK, as well as everywhere else in the world. So I think I'm really encouraged by the new emphasis on school meals and school feeding, not just as an opportunity to provide nutritious food to school-aged children, but to help create an environment where kids learn about food.
They learn about how it's grown, why it's important, and how it's grown in a different way for the environment, for nutrition, for jobs. They learn about nutrition because that's really..
Shiulie Ghosh: That goes into that public awareness issue that needs to be raised.
Lawrence Haddad: We have to grow the knowledge of nutrition as well. I’m optimistic about schools, I’m also optimistic about the workplace. Lots of people who are employed, I think it’s 2 billion people in the world having a regular job, 30% of those are living in poverty. Which is a surprising statistic. And if they’re living in poverty, they’re very likely to be malnourished. And yet, employers do very little to improve the nutrition of their workers. And if they did, they would see that it reduces accidents. It improved productivity, it reduces absenteeism. It breeds loyalty. And the evidence suggests, there’s a 6:1 return. So businesses actually will see this in their bottom line. And, we’ve got some great programmes at GAIN, in India and Kenya, showing that not only are these programmes good for businesses, they obviously improve the diets of hundreds of thousands of young, mostly young women, who of course are very important to improve their nutrition, but also many of them will go on to become mothers and give birth to children.
Where has it all been put together? So I’ve given you schools. I’ve given you workplaces. Civil society is very important for schools. Businesses are very important for workplace. Where has it all been put together? And the only place I’ve really seen it put together is, in the Indian state of Odisha. Now, Odisha is 45 million people. So it’s a big state. Bigger than many African countries. We’ve seen in the last 15-years, the rate of stunting has halved in Odisha, from about 32% to 16%. When I saw those numbers, I didn’t really believe them. So we did an analysis of them. And they really are true. And then you begin to ask, what did they do? They made it the utmost political priority. They set up a mission. The state minister, which is like the Prime Minister of the state, said, “We’re going to create a mission, which means we can cut across all these different sectors.” We’re going to bring all the different stakeholders together. It’s like a mini SUN really at a state level. We’re going to make sure that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So actually, what they did wasn’t, they weren’t huge changes. But they made them in all the right places and they aligned them all. So, it’s really a testimony to the SUN model. But it’s also how important leadership is in this space. Because there is no ministry of nutrition.
Shiulie Ghosh: Absolutely. I think political will is going to be the driving force behind any major changes.
Lawrence Haddad: But leadership, wherever it comes from, political will kind of implies it comes from the government. But often governments are just following everyone else.
Shiulie Ghosh: Oh. That's interesting. I wanted to ask who else should be involved. And I think one of the things that we often talk about is how far the private sector should be involved because the private sector can bring many things to the table: technology, innovation, funding. From your perspective, how important is it to get private organizations and private companies involved in this?
Lawrence Haddad: Well, you know, GAIN works mostly in the food system. And the food system is the private sector. I mean, the government sets the parameters. They set the goals. They draw up the red lines, but essentially the engine is the private sector. And when you talk about the private sector, you have to think about food companies and non-food companies.
It's big multinationals all the way down to micro, small, and medium enterprises. So it's a very nuanced landscape. But very often the debate around the private sector is big mega food companies, but there's so much more to it. Most people who are at risk of malnutrition in Africa, Asia, and Latin America get their food from SMEs.
At GAIN, we always say behind every plate of food is an SME, right? So they're very important. Now there are companies that do good things for nutrition and companies that do bad things. So obviously, the first thing we need to do is to stop the companies doing bad things. And that's irresponsible marketing. It's marketing breast milk substitutes that violate the code. It's the production of ultra-processed foods that are rich, that are tasty, and cheap, but full of nasty stuff. Right. So we need to regulate that. But we also need to really...
I don't just believe in sticks. I believe in the carrots too. If we want our businesses to do good things, we have to incentivise them. We can't rely on business leaders, benevolent business leaders to do the right thing for nutrition. We need to make it part of their core business. So that means ESG standards that incentivise that it builds nutrition into them and incentivise investors to invest in companies that are producing nutritious foods. It means tax breaks for companies that are producing nutritious foods. It means reducing tariffs on essential ingredients that are really critical for nutritious foods. Many nutritious foods are perishable. They require cold storage. Much of the insulation material needed for cold storage has to be imported. Let's reduce the tariffs.
Shiulie Ghosh: Lawrence, thank you very much indeed for that. Thank you all of you for laying out the landscape there. I think that's a useful jumping-off point to get into a wider discussion. So I want to start by asking for those of us on the outside looking in, there seems to be a lot of talk about changing food systems, about making nutrition a priority.
There's been global meetings about it. There's been resources allocated to it. There's been commitments from governments. And yet that needle still hasn't moved really in the right direction. And I wonder what is going wrong? Brieuc, maybe I can start with you. What do we have to do?
Brieuc Pont: Well, Shiulie, that's the 1 million or $1 billion question, if you like. Indeed. A lot of money has been committed, and we, following the Tokyo summit, 42.6 billion USD have been committed and pledged. And that is very humbling. But it's quite a challenge. In fact, quoting my friend Meera Shekar from the World Bank, “I believe what we need is not more money for nutrition. We need more nutrition for money.” Which means we have to be more efficient. And how do we become more efficient? Through coherence. What we are looking at is a sheer number of governments where nutrition is an orphan among all policies.
Sometimes, mother health or father agriculture is the only one in charge. So we need to put all these agencies that work together. And we need business units dedicated to nutrition inside the government’s apparatus, so that we have unified strategies through robust governance. That is really essential, Nutrition needs effective leadership. And this is what the Nutrition for Growth summit in Paris will be promoting.
Shiulie Ghosh: I want to bring up Afshan and Lawrence on this. Afshan, you made a really interesting point about overlapping budgets. So you look at the budget for climate, for example, and you say, well, some of that can be used to improve nutrition because growing food or raising capital, all of that has a climate impact. Should policymakers and countries be looking more into that kind of fund-sharing?
Afshan Khan: You know, I go back to a point that Brieuc made. Half of child deaths are still attributed to malnutrition. So we need to see stronger investment from health care budgets in essential nutrition actions. That means immunisation coupled with screening and detection for malnutrition. It means relying on community health workers. This includes paying those community health workers and ensuring they have the right data and evidence to collect and monitor the situation of children. I would like to see strengthened essential nutrition interventions in the health sector costed into health plans. As a first step, I think we can do far better and more by supporting those essential actions, including prevention of wasting.
There are new guidelines from WHO. How do we implement and roll them out? And are nutrition interventions specifically costed into health care plans? The second area where we have to drive home the agenda is integrating nutrition into the agricultural sector in a more deliberate way. What can we do? Perhaps Lawrence's example shows that so many food producers, such as smallholder farmers, are malnourished. We need to provide good social protection mechanisms for these smallholder farmers or ensure that the prices for their produce allow them to afford food for their families.
So, the agricultural component where smallholder farmers get the right price for their food and are no longer malnourished is key. Additionally, in the agricultural sector, how are we ensuring food is available at an affordable price? Some food subsidies are going in the wrong direction. For instance, we've been advised to eat less sugar, yet sugar subsidies amount to hundreds of millions of dollars every year. So there’s a lot more that can be done with ag subsidies and policies. And the third thing, is our social protection mechanisms worldwide have to be more nutrition sensitive. Lawrence referred to COVID. When I was, during COVID-19 working in Europe and Central Asia, they ramped up social protection mechanisms for vulnerable households. There’s a possibility to do that in countries, to touch the most vulnerable households. I think Brazil, in their Action for Hunger and Poverty Alliances is now doing that, and really to make sure that the social protection mechanisms are nutrition sensitive. So, we’re making sure we’re targeting the most vulnerable households with high rates of malnutrition, and we’re creating incentives so that those households also have the right knowledge and are incentivised to purchase healthier foods.
So there’s a lot that can be done across sectors to increase investment in nutrition in a meaningful way.
Shiulie Ghosh: Lawrence, do you want to add to that? There is a clear, fundamental link between nutrition and other global issues, as both Brieuc and Afshan have pointed out. How do we increase awareness and education that solving many global challenges involves addressing the problem of nutrition?
Lawrence Haddad: Yeah. I want to be a bit provocative, Shiulie, and a bit Eurocentric as well. So the European Football Tournament just finished here, and Spain completely trounced England in the final. And why did they do that? The Spanish players had more imagination. They had more coherence. They had a plan. And In think in Nutrition, we’re a bit too much like England. So while lots of other people have to change, we also have to change in nutrition. We have to use more imagination. We have to say to the ag people, to the social protection people, to the climate people, why is it in your interest to invest? Don’t do us a favour in nutrition. It’s In your interest to do this. We have to get out of our comfort zone and make the case.
How do we shift the narrative around healthy diets? Science is not enough. I’m a scientist. Benefit-cost ratios are not enough. We need to be more efficient in terms of how resources are used.
Shiulie Ghosh: Okay, so we've had the post office analogy and the football analogy. The key is to think differently. Brieuc, in the run-up to N4G,. how are you going to get key players to think differently?
Brieuc Pont: Well, thank you for that question. We are ourselves trying to think differently, which is quite a challenge, I must say, particularly for bureaucrats like me. But we are indeed looking at a fantastic, inspiring, and passionate group of people who seem to have discovered a gem among development policies, which is nutrition, but are struggling to make it known that it works.
So we think it is necessary to engage with the wider public to let taxpayers know that nutrition is not just about food labelling and barcode scanning at supermarkets. It's also about a cross-cutting, transversal approach that makes our development policies more efficient. When you speak of efficiency, you may unlock many potential actions that can be carried out by governments, NGOs, and the private sector. So thinking outside the box also means interacting with other stakeholders beyond one's own ecosystem.
At the end of N4G, we want the working groups and everyone involved in the summit to remember that below the summit, there's generally a mountain to climb. We need cooperation between different stakeholders, including international organizations, philanthropies, NGOs, governments, and companies. This is our approach. We also need to engage with the private sector. If the private sector is not involved, and if we do not show them how much it pays off to be on the right side of history, we are going nowhere.
We will also need to engage with the public through crowdfunding and good communications campaigns to demonstrate how efficient nutrition development policies are. If you do something and don't let people know, it might as well not have been done. So, data and communication are very important.
Shiulie Ghosh: Okay. So, we're a few months away from the N4G summit. Afshan, what is your message to anyone involved in that summit?
Afshan Khan: So, for the SUN countries, because we represent an alliance of governments, civil society, businesses, donors, and UN agencies, it's a unique opportunity we have ahead of the Nutrition for Growth summit with more than 66 countries and stakeholders coming together in Rwanda at the end of November 2024. That gives us the chance to distil what's worked well, identify obstacles, and explore new opportunities. The global gathering will allow us to share best success stories and make new commitments around the nutrition agenda.
More importantly, we aim to find new solutions and seek new partnerships and stakeholders. For all 66 UN countries present, we need to generate dynamic momentum to accelerate progress in the final six years before the Sustainable Development Goals end. We’ve made progress—stunting was reduced by about a third from 2012 to 2022. We have this opportunity to define and understand solutions better and bring new opportunities for action to the table.
This alliance of private sector, small and medium enterprises, government policies, civil society, and UN agencies, which have been instrumental in some countries, can unlock potential through this movement and alliances.
Shiulie Ghosh: Thank you. And Lawrence, what do you want to see come out of the N4G summit? What is your message to stakeholders and other parties?
Lawrence Haddad: Thanks, Shiulie! I just want to reinforce what I've said. Significant progress in nutrition has been made in the last ten years. We mustn’t enter the summit thinking otherwise. I was initially fearful about nutrition outcomes in the context of COVID, but my worst fears were not realized.
I’d like to see very tangible results come out of the summit. I don’t want to hear just talk; I want to see action. For example, it would be amazing if 30 governments embedded nutrition in their occupational safety and health programs. It would also be great if 30 governments included nutrition in their Nationally Determined Contributions for climate emissions and national adaptation plans.
It would be remarkable if 2 or 3 finance institutions, such as regional development banks or development finance institutions, set up a $200 million fund to leverage another $800 million, creating a $1 billion SME fund for credit, not grants, to small and medium enterprises producing nutritious foods for local consumption. It would also be fantastic if a thousand small or medium enterprises prepared themselves for investment. One issue raised by DFIs is the lack of a pipeline for nutritious food SMEs, though I’m not entirely convinced by this.
Finally, it would be significant if large companies signed up to a responsible business pledge, committing to not targeting children with junk food ads and making labels easy to understand. And donors are in a tough spot, with budgets being diverted to defence and immigration. They need to maintain and protect nutrition budgets, especially since only 1% of ODA goes to nutrition. That figure is hard to believe.
Shiulie Ghosh: Yes, that was an incredible figure. Thank you very much, Lawrence. Final few seconds, Brieuc. What is the biggest thing you want to see come out of the N4G summit? What is the biggest commitment or pledge you would like to see from member states?
Brieuc Pont: My first ambition for N4G is that it lives on. We know it’s a vulnerable process, with only four editions so far and signs of donor fatigue, underscored by Lawrence. There’s also the impact of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, which has led to a global food crisis and financial crisis.
We want N4G to become a tradition, so we have not only Nutrition for Growth but also Nutrition for Goods. Secondly, we want this summit to endorse nutrition as a development policy doctrine and make it a universal cause. We need progress on UN policies, with local actors bringing their knowledge to governments and generating out-of-the-box thinking. Multilateral and national development banks can play a massive role, which they didn’t in 2021.
Our strategy includes engaging these banks and showing them the ROI of investing in nutrition, not only for financial returns but also for improving public finance. The burden of nutrition is not only a GDP issue but also impacts social spending.
For instance, 75% of people in elder care in France are there due to malnutrition, which is a problem that can be addressed. Nutrition is not just about economic growth but also social justice and making the world a better place.
Shiulie Ghosh: Yes, that’s a great note to end on—it’s about making the world a better place. Thank you to all my speakers. It’s clear there’s still a mountain to climb, but it’s climbable with the solutions discussed.
The summit takes place in Paris from March 27th to the 28th, 2025. For more information about the summit, efforts to tackle malnutrition, or to rewatch this interview, visit the GAIN website at gainhealth.org.
You can also follow GAIN on all its social media channels. Thank you for watching. Bye for now.