My contribution relate to two action areas:
Action Area 1: Sustainable, resilient food systems for healthy diets
- There is currently a vast gap in 'nutrition sensitiveness' of development programmes in agriculcutre, forestry, health, education, water and sanitation etc. Without improving nutrition sensitiveness of all development interventions, it will be way too difficult to achieve food systems that promote healthy diets. Essentially ground level /micro actions that can direct benefit producers and consumers need to be designed and implemented with deep embedding of nutrition agenda as otherwise nutrition will continue to remain sidelined and /or just confined to some nutrition-specific programmes. We should move away from knee-jerk reactions for addressing symptoms (e.g. with ready to use theraputic food) to tackling the root causes of malnutrition (in its various forms) for large number of people currently experience malnutrition.
Action Area 6: Strengthened governance and accountability for nutrition
- Accountability assurance would essentially mean effectively tracking the performance and impact of current programmes and policies. Needless to say, we should make a strong move towards evidence-informed planning and programming. Without this, we will continue to highlight some pockets of achievements at macro level (e.g. nutrition policies, nutrition investments) without really making deep impact at micro and meso levels. We would need to understand the big picture as well as large number of smallers pictures to analyse where a county/province/state/country/region stands on nutrition achievements and gaps. Importance of robust statistical analysis and monitoring and evaluation systems in this context can never be overemphasised in this context.
Mr. Ravinder Kumar