Nutrition
Strengthening nutrition saves lives, and unlocks better health, education and prosperity across society.
Introduction
The goal of eliminating maternal and child malnutrition is within reach. By accelerating our efforts and deepening local and global partnerships, we can bring an end to malnutrition sooner. We work in partnerships to make faster progress towards the World Health Assembly goal of reducing wasting prevalence by 5% by 2030, and break the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition globally.
To ensure the right nutrition interventions get to those who need them, CIFF supports partners to deliver innovative, flexible and fit-for-purpose finance and delivery mechanisms. These help build multi-sectoral action, and encourage governments to invest in nutrition.
Investment case
Children don’t experience hunger and malnutrition in isolation; they impact every other area of their life. The solutions exist but ongoing innovation is needed to ensure that high-impact, evidence-based and cost-effective interventions are properly enabled to reach those who need them most.
45 million children worldwide are impacted by wasting at any given time, making them 12 times more likely to die than their peers.
Children with wasting are three times more likely to become “stunted” – severely limiting their growth, impacting their emotional and behavioural development, performance in school and, later on, their economic prosperity.
Undernutrition and malnutrition are linked to the deaths of nearly half of children under five. Investing in nutrition is one of the most vital steps for saving the lives of children.
With conflict and weather patterns impacting access to food, targeted work such as scaling evidence-led initiatives, launching innovative financing mechanisms, and ensuring nutrition is integrated into health systems and services, is imperative to ending malnutrition and save lives.
Healthy communities are a bedrock of prosperous whole societies. Well-nourished children are 33% more likely to find routes out of poverty compared to children who suffer from malnutrition.
By ensuring access to nutritious food from childhood, we can pave the way for a thriving future, helping lift households and communities out of poverty and benefiting wider economies.
Key priorities
Products and supplies
Our goal: To ensure nutritional access for the most vulnerable populations around the world.
CIFF works with partners – manufacturers, multilaterals, governments, health workers and communities – to help ensure products are reaching those who need them most, quickly and at scale.
One of the greatest innovative developments in nutrition is multiple micronutrient supplements (MMS), which were created to help provide pregnant women and newborn babies with the right nutritional benefits for a healthy pregnancy and a start in life. Ready-to-use therapeutic foods have also been developed for children who are experiencing severe malnutrition; these have saved the lives of millions around the world.
Financing
Our goal: To mobilise funding resources that can help sustainably end global malnutrition.
CIFF is a co-founding partner of the UNICEF-led Child Nutrition Fund (CNF). This is a catalytic funding instrument leveraging philanthropic matches and supplier financing to incentivise and encourage both private finance as well as government funding. By working with governments in line with the UN’s global Sustainable Development Goals, nutrition financing can be made resilient.
CIFF has partnered with the African Development Bank to demonstrate how philanthropic capital can blend with concessional financing to support governments to strengthen and sustain country-led and high-quality school feeding programs at scale.
Innovation and integration in delivery
Our goal: To enable the evidence-based solutions that exist to reach as many people globally as possible
CIFF works in collaboration with global and local partners to ensure that products and initiatives that were designed to save lives and improve nutrition for children around the world can be delivered at the scale required.
For example, CIFF is working with Gavi’s Matching Fund and UNICEF to reach children who’ve long been left behind. Rather than asking parents to make separate trips for vaccines, nutrition support and birth registration, this partnership focuses on bringing all these services together, right to the heart of communities.
Related regions and programmes
Nutrition team
CIFF’s Nutrition team harnesses a wealth of experience and works globally to help end malnutrition.
