After a year’s delay, the third Nutrition for Growth (N4G) summit took place this week and saw 156 stakeholders and 66 countries make 230 commitments to tackle malnutrition and to advocate for nutrition as a basic human right. There were many successes of the summit, not least the incredible total of $27bn pledged to tackle malnutrition, the highest ever.
So here are just some of our favourites, (and one moment that didn’t go down so well).
1. Civil Society Network (CSN) commitments
Well, of course we have to start with the incredible work of our Civil Society Network, don’t we? Unlike some of the summits this year, civil society presence at N4G was definitely existent, the result of much advocacy in previous months. Although you can never have too much civil society representation, it was great to see country level Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), global INGOs and youth activists on many of the panels. Day two in particular had a lot of familiar CSN colleagues, including Christine Campeau, Emily Monville Oro, Zuhra Dadgar-Shafiq and more, who delivered their organisation’s commitments and gave us an insight into the country level context in which they work.
Along with the virtual panellists, civil society had a 10 minute slot to present the incredible commitments from our network. The video we played showed our diverse range of CSN members delivering the strong commitments from their organisations covering the many ways they pledge to tackle malnutrition in the next few years.
2. SUN country commitments
Along with the strong commitments from civil society and a number of private sector organisations, the N4G summit showcased strong pledges from governments around the world, including a number of SUN countries. Significant financial commitments came out of countries such as the US who pledged $11bn and Japan who committed over $2.8bn. But it was the countries with a high burden of malnutrition who truly led the way. Ghana pledged to reduce wasting figures to less than 5%, The Gambia to reduce stunting to 10% and Malawi to reduce all forms of malnutrition by 30% by 2026. In Asia, Pakistan will reduce women’s anaemia rates by 13%, and Kyrgyzstan hopes to reduce anaemia rates by 30%. The newest SUN country, Ecuador, pledged to develop financing mechanisms for the prevention & reduction of child malnutrition and in Peru, the government will make prevention of malnutrition among new-borns and infants a priority. Many of these commitments are the result of a great deal of hard work through advocacy and collaboration on behalf of Civil Society Alliances (CSAs) and are a strong success of the summit.
3. Inclusion and diversity
Ahead of the UN Food Systems Summit in September, the SUN movement issued a joint call to action outlining our hopes for this and future summits. It included a desire that it would be ‘‘inclusive and ensure a balanced representation of stakeholders, providing meaningful space to nutrition grassroots movements, particularly those involving youth, women and indigenous people.” While the N4G summit did not overwhelm us with the amount of inclusivity, it did at least feel that the representation was meaningful and less tokenistic. Dr Myrna Cunningham was given a platform to powerfully advocate for indeginous methods of sustainable agriculture and argued strongly in favour of gender transformative action. Similarly Maureen Muketha and Barbados’ Pierre Cook represented youth activists on the Food Systems Transformation for Healthy Diets panel, (yes, TWO youth representatives on one panel), and were given an equal platform to ask questions and debate with their fellow panellists. Our very own Youth Leaders for Nutrition were given their own slot during the summit too, during which they showcased their own bold commitment, putting certain stakeholders to shame.
4. Strong thematic representation
Along with more meaningful representation, the N4G summit showed stronger and more in-depth discussions on its thematic focuses. With fewer panels across the two days, we were given time to really sink our teeth into the conversations about resilience in fragile and conflict- affected states, transforming food systems and including nutrition in universal health coverage. It was also fantastic to see cross-cutting issues such as gender transformative action, nutrition as a basic human right, climate change and amplifying the role of indeginous populations come through loud and clear. Finally, alongside great commitments, there was plenty of talk about accountability. This year saw the creation of the first Nutrition Accountability Framework from the Global Nutrition Report and there is therefore no getting out of these promises now. As a network, we will be working hard to hold both ourselves and others accountable for the commitments made this week.
5. The lack of financial commitment from the FCDO
The UK government hosted the first ever Nutrition for Growth summit in 2012 and has since made it clear that they want to be considered a leader in the fight against malnutrition. So it was with great shock and disappointment that at this year's N4G the UK government pledged…$0. Yup, the US government pledged $11 billion, the EU $2.8 billion and the UK gave no financial commitment and no impact target. This when combined with the damaging reduction of development spending from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP speaks volumes of a lack of UK commitment.Many UK-based INGOs such as Results, Concern Worldwide and Save the Children UK have expressed their concern over the lack of commitment, financial or otherwise. Kirsty McNeill, Executive Director of Policy, Advocacy & Campaigns at Save the Children, said: “Almost half of global child deaths are linked to malnutrition, and the effects of the pandemic are creating a hunger crisis for children in many of the world’s most fragile countries. In this context the UK Government’s failure to make any financial or impact commitment at today’s Nutrition for Growth Summit beggars belief.”
Even without a commitment from the UK, this year’s N4G summit has been the most successful to date. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic pushing already vulnerable people further into poverty and malnutrition, along with the climate crisis impacting the natural world, it is clear we need to fight for nutrition more than ever. Along with the strong themes of climate, resilience and gender transformation that we saw this week, what came up time and time again was that this is no longer about goals, but about rights. The right to healthy nutrition is a fundamental human right and at the N4G summit, the world treated it as such.
The SUN CSN is a civil society network made up of over 4000 organisations from grassroots level to INGOs. Save the Children is a part of the CSN and Save the Children UK hosts the secretariat team.
