New York, NY
DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR COLEMAN: Thanks, Matt, for that introduction, and for the opportunity to speak to this coalition today. I’m sorry to not be able to join you in-person, but I am delighted to share a few words on USAID’s commitment to preventing and treating child wasting this afternoon.
Many of you in this room are already familiar with USAID’s malnutrition work. Administrator Power and I would like to express our deep gratitude for your generous commitments, critical collaboration, and thought leadership on this issue.
My comments today are in run-up to one of USAID’s signature events this UNGA: “The Child Malnutrition Crisis: Pledging to Save Lives” event, co-hosted by UNICEF, the Government of Senegal, and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation this Wednesday afternoon.
This issue is a top priority for Administrator Power and all of us at USAID, and the current and new commitments contributed by many of the organizations here today will truly help us move the needle on wasting treatment and prevention.
We look forward to celebrating our partners and their commitments at the Wednesday event and encourage those who will not be in attendance to view the livestream and share it with your networks.
This group is well aware that the world is facing an acute malnutrition crisis, driven by climate change, historic levels of drought in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, persistent ongoing humanitarian crises, and the worsening of the global food crisis driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
As you well know, malnutrition is a scourge upon the world’s children. It drives 45 percent of all deaths for children under the age of five. According to UNICEF, an additional 260,000 children in the 15 most affected countries have suffered from severe wasting since the beginning of this year.
Equally worrisome, the cognitive and physical development of children who survive malnutrition is severely compromised, jeopardizing the health of future generations.
Although financing for nutrition has increased in the past decade, the world is still lagging far behind what is needed. The nutrition sector remains under-prioritized and under-resourced. Despite nutrition’s foundational role in all development work, donors currently spend less than 1 percent of development assistance on nutrition.
Even more concerning, is that most domestic budgets do not adequately prioritize nutrition. We laud the 25 Scaling up Nutrition (SUN) countries who contribute $16.2 billion in domestic nutrition allocations and were heartened by the strong policy and financial commitments made by forty five low- and middle-income country governments at the 2021 Tokyo Nutrition for Growth Summit.
Still, in order to make sustainable advancements that have generational impacts, we need to help partner countries integrate proven nutrition practices into all of their development priorities.
The genesis of this coalition, Stronger Foundations for Nutrition, is the reality that with simple, evidence-based investments, we can transform food systems to support the more than 3 billion people who can’t afford or access the nutrition they need to build fruitful lives.
We can ensure that increased access to primary health care services means delivery of life-saving nutrition services. And we can optimize the impact of humanitarian assistance through delivery of quality nutrition services.
Building on years of U.S. investment and support for nutrition programs – support that has helped more than 100 million children escape the devastating and lasting effects of poor nutrition – the United States is working to fill the immediate gaps in access to treatment, especially for children in the settings most impacted by the current crisis.
USAID is working to maximize impact by aligning our investments in humanitarian response, health, and food systems.
When disaster strikes and urgent humanitarian assistance is needed, USAID works to ensure that humanitarian response services such as screening and treatment of acute malnutrition, and support for breastfeeding in emergencies can reach more women and children with proven, cost-effective care.
In South Sudan, for example, where 1.34 million children are expected to suffer from wasting this year, USAID provided emergency assistance to ensure screening of 2.5 million children for malnutrition and enable treatment of the severely wasted, including through support for nearly 190,000 cartons of ready-to-use therapeutic food this past year, with an additional 240,000 RUTF cartons to come from our recent supplemental support to UNICEF.
While the announcements that will be made at USAID’s Child Wasting event will focus on additional support for wasting treatment, it’s also critical to accelerate action on wasting prevention to build a future where no child suffers from acute malnutrition. We can only do this by building resilient health systems and sustainable food systems.
Through USAID’s Global Health Bureau and Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global food security and hunger initiative, we work with partners across the food and health systems to improve families’ access to safe, affordable, and nourishing diets and access to essential, lifesaving nutrition services like skilled counseling for breastfeeding, and maternal micronutrient supplementation.
By investing in transformation of food and health systems to improve the availability and accessibility of nutritious foods and nutrition services, USAID is investing in a future where children have the nutrition they need to survive, grow up to unlock their potential, and become active contributors to their countries’ prosperity.
Food systems must function to deliver safe, affordable, and nutritious food year-round, particularly for women and children. Across low- and middle-income countries, fewer than one in five children in the critical 6-23 month period are benefiting from a minimum acceptable diet.
Leveraging its decades-long leadership in combating global hunger, USAID is ensuring food systems deliver for nutrition alongside delivering good jobs and greater food security.
In Senegal, Feed the Future’s Kawolor project, “Abundance” in Diola dialect, exemplifies the successful food systems approach. The Kawolor project trains and supports local institutions and community leaders to scale up nutrition-led agriculture practices and utilize a private sector-led approach to link activities to ongoing market operations for greater system sustainability.
Women’s groups, called Debo Galle, are at the heart of the Kawolor program. For example, Kany Ndiaye, president of her village’s Debo Galle, regularly hosts talks and makes home visits to improve women's knowledge on nutrition, hygienic food preparation practices, and family hygiene.
Kany also works with village health centers to counsel new mothers on the benefits of breastfeeding and weaning onto nutritious solid foods.
By empowering leaders like Kany, the Kawolor project has led to measurable increases in the percentage of young children receiving a minimum acceptable diet, with a six-fold increase from 3.8 percent of children in 2018 to 23.2 percent of children in 2022. Kawolor interventions have also increased the participation of women in decision-making on children’s health by 24 percent, from 69 percent to nearly 94 percent of women.
USAID also helps countries strengthen their ability to deliver and scale their nutrition services through their existing health structures, including promotion of breastfeeding, care of small and sick newborns; vitamin A supplementation for children; providing iron and folic acid supplements to pregnant women and counseling on mothers’ and children’s diets.
In Rwanda, for example, USAID interventions have led to exclusive breastfeeding rates of over 80 percent and vitamin A supplementation reaching over 90 percent of children.
Together with UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID have a long-standing partnership to improve nutrition data. This has driven a transformational improvement in the quality and utility of data for nutritional status, quality of diets, and coverage of essential services in the demographic and health surveys, one of the key data sources for nutrition globally.
We also are forging a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to reposition fortification of staples and condiments with essential vitamins and nutrients as an essential food systems action. This is particularly relevant as food prices soar and families struggle to purchase a nutritious diet.
With the Eleanor Crook Foundation and the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, we are working to close the financing gap for small and medium enterprises that produce nutritious foods.
These enterprises are essential actors in processing the foods that households across low- and middle-income countries eat every day, as well as producing specialized nutrition products. We are trying to catalyze more support for the flagship Nutritious Foods Financing Facility and would welcome others to join us.
As many of you know from your last quarterly meeting, USAID undertook a process to update the Nutrition Priority Countries for the first time in over a decade as an opportunity to provide enhanced support, realign priority designation with resources, and focus on accountability and learning. This process provides an opportunity to focus on in-country collaboration, in addition to global partnerships.
The world is at a critical juncture in living up to commitments to good nutrition for children and mothers. After a decade of progress, we risk stagnating or backsliding. This group is critical to keep all of us engaged and energized to meet the world’s nutrition promises.
We’re not willing to accept defeat. This coalition of partners is made for this moment. The expertise, collective voice, and investments of nutrition philanthropies is more important now than ever, and I am grateful, on behalf of all of us at USAID, that you are showing up to help build a healthier and well-nourished world.
There may never be a moment like this one, when so much of the world’s attention is galvanized on global food security and preventing a truly devastating global food crisis.
While it seems a long time ago, the 2021 Tokyo Nutrition for Growth Summit was the most successful to date. Many of you in the room today contributed to that success, and together you brought philanthropic commitments to over $1 billion. We need to mobilize now to ensure that France’s hosting of Nutrition for Growth in 2024 is an even greater success.
Together, we must do all we can to seize this moment and continue to devise new ways to overcome today’s crisis and work to both prevent and end global hunger and malnutrition.
Thank you.