Aid for nutrition: Using innovative financing to end undernutrition

This report builds upon an earlier study (Aid for nutrition: Can investments to scale up nutrition actions be accurately tracked ? July 2012), which documented low levels of financial investments in nutrition, highlighted major problems with current reporting practices and proposed a series of reforms to address these. Focusing on the 36 high burden countries, the current study examines three different questions. First, it considers how much funding is required to achieve the Scaling up Nutrition (SUN) objectives for direct nutrition-specific interventions over the next ten years. Second, it examines the implications of different ways of allocating this funding between domestic and external sources. Third, the study explores option for how the necessary external funds could be raised. The report is structured as follows:

• Section 1 gives some background on the SUN Mouvement, and briefly reviews the case for financial support.
• Section 2 updates and extends the regional and global cost estimates developed in 2010 by a World Bank costing study (Horton et al., 2010).
• Section 3 considers the potential sources of external funding, with a specific focus on the domestic-external funding ratio.
• Section 4 examines the implications of the two-stage scale up of nutrition proposed by Horton et al.
• Section 5 discusses external funding options based on additional ODA from traditional donors.
• Section 6 introduces some alternative, innovative options for raising external finance
• Section 7 proposes some policy recommendations.

 ACF, IDS (Institute of Development Studies) - September 2012