An Investment Framework for Nutrition: Reaching the Global Targets for Stunting, Anemia, Breastfeeding, and Wasting estimates the costs, impacts, and financing scenarios to achieve the World Health Assembly global nutrition targets for stunting, anemia in women, exclusive breastfeeding and the scaling up of the treatment of severe wasting among young children. To reach these four targets, the world needs US$70 billion over 10 years to invest in high-impact nutrition-specific interventions. This investment would have enormous benefits: 65 million cases of stunting and 265 million cases of anemia in women would be prevented in 2025 as compared with the 2015 baseline. In addition, at least 91 million more children would be treated for severe wasting and 105 million additional babies would be exclusively breastfed during the first six months of life over 10 years. Altogether, achieving these targets would avert at least 3.7 million child deaths. Every dollar invested in this package of interventions would yield between US$4 and US$35 in economic returns, making investing in early nutrition one of the best value-for-money development actions. Although some of the targets—especially those for reducing stunting in children and anemia in women—are ambitious and will require concerted efforts in financing, scale-up, and sustained commitment, recent experience from several countries suggests that meeting these targets is feasible. These investments in the critical 1000-day window of early childhood are inalienable and portable and will pay lifelong dividends—not only for children directly affected but also for us all in the form of more robust societies—that will drive future economies.

Nutrition investments affect human capital formation, which in turn affects economic growth. Malnutrition is intrinsically connected to human capital—undernutrition contributes to nearly half of child mortality, and stunting reduces productivity and earnings in adulthood. Improving nutrition requires a multisectoral effort, but it is difficult to identify and quantify the basic financing parameters as used in traditional sectors. What is being spent and by whom and on what? To address these questions, nutrition public expenditure reviews (NPERs) determine the level of a country’s overall nutrition public spending and assess whether its expenditure profile will enable the country to realize its nutrition goals and objectives. When done well, NPERs go beyond simply quantifying how much is spent on nutrition; they measure how well money is being spent to achieve nutrition outcomes and identify specific recommendations for improvement. A Guiding Framework for Nutrition Public Expenditure Reviews presents the key elements of an NPER and offers guidance, practical steps, and examples for carrying out an NPER. The book draws upon good practices from past NPERs as well as common practices and expertise from public expenditure reviews in other sectors. This handbook is intended for practitioners who are tasked with carrying out NPERs. Other target audiences include country nutrition policy makers, development partner officials, government technical staff, and nutrition advocates. The book presents data and analytical challenges faced by previous NPER teams and lays out the kinds of analyses that past NPERs have been able to carry out and those that they were unable to perform because of data or capacity constraints. It concludes with further work needed at the global and country levels to create the conditions necessary to conduct more comprehensive NPERs.

In December 2016, FAO and WHO convened an International Symposium on Sustainable Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Improved Nutrition, gathering delegates from 90 UN Member States representatives of intergovernmental organizations, private-sector entities, civil society organizations, academia/research organizations and producer organizations/cooperatives. The symposium aimed to increase awareness of today’s urgent food and nutrition challenges, and to create a forum to discuss strategies for regulation and reform, in the aftermath of the ICN2 and under the umbrella of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition 2016-2025. Nine parallel sessions comprising expert presentations and country case studies were complemented by a session on the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition, a student’s session, plenary and special events. These proceedings include summaries of the parallel sessions, summaries and transcriptions from the plenary and Decade of Action sessions, to contribute to better-informed, accelerated action at national, regional and global levels on the urgent need to improve the human and environmental health of food systems worldwide and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

An important, hopeful book that looks at the urgent problem of childhood malnutrition worldwide and the revolutionary progress being made to end it. A healthy Earth requires healthy children. Yet nearly one-fourth of the world's children are stunted physically and mentally due to a lack of food or nutrients. These children do not die but endure a lifetime of diminished potential. During the past thirty years, says Sharman Russell, we have seen a revolution in how we treat these sick children and in how--with a new understanding of the human body and approach to nutrition, and new ways to reach out to hungry mothers and babies--we have gone from unwittingly killing severely malnourished children to bringing them back to health through the "miracle" of ready-to-eat therapeutic food. Intertwined with stories of scientists and nutrition experts on the front lines of finding ways to end malnutrition for good, Russell writes of her travels to Malawi, one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the world and also the site of pathbreaking, cutting-edge research into childhood malnutrition. (Eighty percent of Malawians are farmers subsisting on less than an acre of land and coping with erratic weather patterns due to global warming; fifty percent live below the poverty line; and forty-two percent of Malawi's children are affected by a lack of food or nutrients.) As she writes of her personal exploration of new friendships and insights in a country known as "the warm heart of Africa," Russell describes the programs that are working best to reduce childhood stunting and explores how malnutrition in children is connected to climate change, how vitamins and minerals are preventing these harmful effects, why the empowerment of women is the single most effective factor in eliminating childhood malnutrition, and what the costs of ending childhood malnutrition are. Sharman Russell, much-admired writer of luminous prose and humane heart, whose writing has been called, "elegant" (The Economist) and "extraordinarily well-crafted, far-reaching, and heart-wrenching" (Booklist), winner of the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing, has written an illuminating, inspiring book that makes clear the promise of what is today, gratefully, within our grasp.

Malnutrition is a huge burden on the Arab Republic of Egypt’s economy. Undernutrition—manifested by poor linear growth (stunting), wasting, and micronutrient deficiencies in children and by anemia among women of reproductive age—collectively saps an estimated two percent of Egypt’s annual gross domestic product through forgone productivity and health care costs, representing an economic hemorrhaging of billions of U.S. dollars per year. Adding to this challenge is the co-occurrence of overweight and obesity among children, leading to a malnutrition double burden. Scaling Up Nutrition in the Arab Republic of Egypt aims to inform the development of nutrition policy and guide nutrition investments over the coming years. It reviews Egypt’s nutrition situation, the interventions currently in place, and the opportunities, costs, benefits, and fiscal space implications of scaling up a set of high-impact interventions to address undernutrition. The book, a collaborative effort between the World Bank and UNICEF, is targeted at all those involved in developing and implementing nutrition interventions in Egypt and beyond.

This brief examines estimates produced by several recent model simulations and frameworks that focus on the cost of ending hunger as well as progress toward other development goals—estimates that range from US$7 billion to US$265 billion per year. The differences among these estimates are largely attributable to the different targeted objectives and policy questions of each modeling exercise, different investment strategies considered, and varying assumptions about the role of different sectors in reducing hunger.

Updates for many countries have made it possible to estimate hunger in the world with greater accuracy this year. In particular, newly accessible data enabled the revision of the entire series of undernourishment estimates for China back to 2000, resulting in a substantial downward shift of the series of the number of undernourished in the world. Nevertheless, the revision confirms the trend reported in past editions: the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. The report also shows that the burden of malnutrition in all its forms continues to be a challenge. There has been some progress for child stunting, low birthweight and exclusive breastfeeding, but at a pace that is still too slow. Childhood overweight is not improving and adult obesity is on the rise in all regions. The report complements the usual assessment of food security and nutrition with projections of what the world may look like in 2030, if trends of the last decade continue. Projections show that the world is not on track to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 and, despite some progress, most indicators are also not on track to meet global nutrition targets. The food security and nutritional status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socio economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report puts a spotlight on diet quality as a critical link between food security and nutrition. Meeting SDG 2 targets will only be possible if people have enough food to eat and if what they are eating is nutritious and affordable. The report also introduces new analysis of the cost and affordability of healthy diets around the world, by region and in different development contexts. It presents valuations of the health and climate-change costs associated with current food consumption patterns, as well as the potential cost savings if food consumption patterns were to shift towards healthy diets that include sustainability considerations. The report then concludes with a discussion of the policies and strategies to transform food systems to ensure affordable healthy diets, as part of the required efforts to end both hunger and all forms of malnutrition.