Rethinking Nutrition Financing for Greater Impact and Sustainability

In today’s unpredictable development climate, like other programs, funding for nutrition-specific interventions is becoming increasingly vulnerable. A new policy paper by the Center for Global Development analyzes nutrition-specific financing, incorporating relevant insights from the wider global health sector. The authors highlight three key obstacles: highly fragmented architecture; dependence on volatile external aid from a few core donors, and small domestic spending with insufficient incentives. Four policy recommendations are proposed to boost impact and sustainability.

1. Leverage additional resources for nutrition by pooling financing with multilateral development banks
2. Explore options to make external financing for nutrition more stable and predictable
3. Prioritize long-term planning to prepare countries to transition from external financing to domestic financing
4. Ensure strong accountability for performance and results