SDGs – Nutrition

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Global Nutrition Report 2017 – Nourishing the SDGs
Development Initiatives Poverty Research Ltd.
2017 :: 115 pages
PDF: https://www.globalnutritionreport.org/files/2017/11/Report_2017.pdf
Executive Summary [excerpt]
The world faces a grave nutrition situation – but the Sustainable Development Goals present an unprecedented opportunity to change that.

A better nourished world is a better world. Yet despite the significant steps the world has taken towards improving nutrition and associated health burdens over recent decades, this year’s Global Nutrition Report shows what a large-scale and universal problem nutrition is. The global community is grappling with multiple burdens of malnutrition. Our analysis shows that 88% of
countries for which we have data face a serious burden of either two or three forms of malnutrition (childhood stunting, anaemia in women of reproductive age and/or overweight in adult women).

The number of children aged under five who are chronically or acutely undernourished (stunted and wasted) may have fallen in many countries, but our data tracking shows that global progress to reduce these forms of malnutrition is not rapid enough to meet internationally agreed nutrition targets, including Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 2.2 to end all forms of malnutrition by 2030. Hunger statistics are going in the wrong direction: now 815 million people are going to bed hungry, up from 777 million in 2015. The reality of famines in the world today means
achieving these targets, especially for wasting, will become even more challenging. Indeed, an estimated 38 million people are facing severe food insecurity in Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen while Ethiopia and Kenya are experiencing significant droughts.

No country is on track to meet targets to reduce anaemia among women of reproductive age, and the number of women with anaemia has actually increased since 2012. Exclusive breastfeeding of infants aged 0–5 months has marginally increased, but progress is too slow (up 2% from baseline). And the inexorable rise in the numbers of children and adults who are overweight and obese continues. The probability of meeting the internationally agreed targets to halt the rise in obesity and diabetes by 2025 is less than 1%.

Too many people are being left behind from the benefits of improved nutrition. Yet when we look at the wider context, the opportunity for change has never been greater. The SDGs, adopted by 193 countries in 2015, offer a tremendous window of opportunity to reverse or stop these trends. They are an agenda that aims to ‘transform our world’. Many such aspirational statements have been made in the past, so what makes the SDGs different? The promise can be summed up
in two words: universal – for all, in every country – and integrated – by everyone, connecting to achieve the goals. This has enormous practical implications for what we do and how we do it.

First, it means focusing on inequities in low, middle and high-income countries and between them, to ensure that everyone is included in progress, and everyone is counted. Second, it means that the time of tackling problems in isolation is well and truly over. If we want to transform our world, for everyone, we must all stop acting in silos, remembering that people do not live in silos.

We have known for some time that actions delivered through the ‘nutrition sector’ alone can only go so far. For example, delivering the 10 interventions that address stunting directly would only reduce stunting globally by 20%. The SDGs are telling us loud and clear: we must deliver multiple goals through shared action. Nutrition is part of that shared action. Action on nutrition is needed to achieve goals across the SDGs, and, in turn, action throughout the SDGs is needed to address the causes of malnutrition. If we can work together to build connections through the SDG system, we will ensure that the 2016–2025 Decade of Action on Nutrition declared by the UN will be a ‘Decade of Transformative Impact’.