December 13, 2021
On December 6, Stronger Foundations for Nutrition, a new coalition of private donors, announced bold new commitments of over $1 billion to fight malnutrition at an official Nutrition for Growth Summit side event, “Financing the Nutrition Agenda: New Commitments, New Partnerships.” The Eleanor Crook Foundation is a founding member of the coalition, which first formed on the margins of the 2017 Global Nutrition Summit in Milan. During the 2021 N4G side event, ECF announced a recommitment of $50 million towards ending severe childhood malnutrition.
“Beyond the dollars themselves, the diversity of this donor community offers a powerful and inspiring signal that there is real innovation happening in how funds are raised and disbursed, and that if we want to truly end malnutrition we have to start dreaming bigger,” said Executive Director of Stronger Foundations for Nutrition, Matt Freeman.
Stronger Foundations for Nutrition is now in rapid scale-up mode and brings together diverse philanthropic and corporate donors to make catalytic new investments to improve nutrition outcomes around the world. The group aims to work across health and food systems in four continents over the next several years.
Despite malnutrition being the number one killer of children globally, it often remains an afterthought in global health and development. To date, global malnutrition receives less than 1% of all official development assistance. Stronger Foundations for Nutrition aims to elevate malnutrition as one of the world’s greatest and most critical challenges.
“Nutrition is not just about system strengthening and capacity building – it’s about delivering real, lifesaving services to people who need them,” said ECF CEO William Moore, “For decades, we’ve known how to prevent and treat deadly malnutrition in a cost-effective way: prenatal vitamins for pregnant women, support for breastfeeding mothers, vitamin A supplementation for young children, and treatment with therapeutic food to stop severely malnourished kids from dying. We need to deploy these tools and scale these interventions to save lives. It’s time to focus our efforts and get to work.”
ECF will devote at least $50 million over the next several years to bring these interventions – collectively known as the “Power 4” – to scale across nine high-burden countries. Building off an initial announcement at the Milan summit in 2017, ECF will continue to combat severe malnutrition through its robust research, policy, and advocacy portfolio that include working with the World Health Organization and UNICEF to scale up proven interventions. ECF will also continue to build on a coalition-led, bipartisan proposal called Nourish the Future that aims to strengthen the links between health and food systems to combat malnutrition and save and improve millions of lives.
LifePack, developed by ECF, will also partner with KRAFTON (PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS) and other gaming companies to reach more than 1 million children with therapeutic foods in 2022. This initiative will be funded by donations mobilized through the LifePack video gaming campaign.
Along with ECF, founding members of Stronger Foundations for Nutrition include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Tata Trusts, Rockefeller Foundation, Dangote Foundation, King Philanthropies, Family-Larsson Rosenquist Foundation, Chaudhary Foundation, Kirk Humanitarian, and Rotary International. Stronger Foundations for Nutrition works across health, food and social protection systems in pursuit of all nutrition outcomes and more virtuous and sustainable food systems.
Other commitments made at the event included:
Additional philanthropic commitments from Stronger Foundations for Nutrition members made in the 2021 Nutrition for Growth Year of Action include:
This brings the total philanthropic commitments pledged in 2021 to over $1 billion.
Since the Nutrition for Growth Summit in 2013, these private philanthropies have pledged more than $3.4 billion to nutrition, joining governments, civil society organizations and the private sector to raise new resources toward ending malnutrition. The community of philanthropic funders for nutrition has grown from just two at the 2013 Nutrition for Growth Summit to more than a dozen funders today.
Image 1 – © UNICEF/UN0509184/Abdul
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