Hungry for change. An eight step costed plan of action to tackle global child hunger

The report proposes a package with eight components designed to improve the diets of pregnant women and children under the age of two, and thereby to help prevent hunger and malnutrition. The package focuses first on the eight countries where 50% of the world's malnourished children live. Save the Children estimates the cost of the package to be US$8.8 billion per year for those countries.

The steps are as follows:

• Coordinated effort across line ministries
• Citizen lobby and involvement, via an international civil society campaign
• Coordination of efforts between The World Bank and UN agencies
• Prioritising of malnutrition in the International Health Partnership, future partnerships on agriculture, food security and nutrition, and any new funds for enhancing safety nets and social protection.
• Improvement of national and international systems for monitoring the food security and nutrition situation
• Role of the private sector to be enhanced
• Scaling up of funding by bilateral and multilateral donors to the countries with the highest burden of malnutrition and prioritise actions that focus on the period from a child's conception to his/her second birthday.

Save the Children - 2009