Role of stakeholders in Nutrition Accountability Framework reporting
From April to July 2024, nutrition commitment-makers were, for the first time, reporting into the Nutrition Accountability Framework (NAF). Launched by the Global Nutrition Report (GNR) in 2021 for the Tokyo Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit, the NAF is the world’s independent and comprehensive platform for registering and monitoring Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound (SMART) nutrition commitments. Endorsed by the government of Japan, the SUN Movement, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, USAID, and many others, it provides both granularity and a big-picture view on the progress commitment-makers are achieving towards a world without malnutrition. For example, using this tool, we were able to ascertain that nearly a quarter (24%) of all commitments made for the last N4G Summit were in response to Covid-19; that most “impact” goals still focus on undernutrition—despite emerging interest in obesity; and that low- and lower-middle-income countries are the largest stakeholder group committing.
The NAF is unique in equally centring all stakeholders—whether governments, donor governments, other donor organisations, international organisations, civil society organisations, private sector, or academia—and providing them a standardised way to present their nutrition commitments and their progress. It ensures that all nutrition commitments can be captured, and monitored consistently and transparently.
Following the NAF’s launch for the 2021 N4G Summit, 203 commitment makers from 84 countries registered 443 commitments and 925 goals. This is about double the number of commitment makers and commitments in the first (2013) N4G Summit. Following up with commitment makers has become more streamlined over the years, and though the NAF systematises the progress reporting process, the GNR does not accomplish tracking this volume of commitments on its own. Doing so requires the community’s support. Everyone’s contributions are necessary for the NAF to succeed.
For almost a decade, a range of efforts have supported reporting on nutrition commitment progress. Before progress reports even reach the GNR, different constituencies have often engaged in different activities to assess their progress. Now that we have the NAF, we find that those activities are channelling commitment makers back to it.
In 2022, the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement Civil Society Network (SUN CSN) launched its “We are all accountable” campaign, to “highlight progress against commitments, through a qualitative lens while supporting civil society to report into the NAF.” Likewise, the EU4SUN project, utilising the NAF tools, supported several country governments in Francophone Africa to strengthen their capacity to assess their nutrition commitments, to prepare them to report their progress into the NAF and look forward to the next Summit; they are now beginning a phase in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as in Anglophone Africa. The Access to Nutrition Initiative (ATNI) has also fed into the NAF (assessing private sector commitments for N4G 2021) and has accountability metrics—e.g. its Global Food Manufacturers Index and Breastmilk Substitutes and Complementary Foods Marketing Indexes to help hold private sector to account.
Donors use the SUN Movement Donor Network (SDN) Methodology to calculate their nutrition-related investments from their Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) data on overseas development assistance (ODA).
For example, for the 2023 G7 Elmau meeting, Canada using these tools reported US$ $1.24 billion in nutrition-sensitive and US$ 115.7 million in nutrition-specific expenditures respectively for 2021, and they utilised this approach again for their 2024 reporting into the NAF. As a more detailed example, the reports below outline the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s (and formerly the Department for International Development’s) annual estimated bilateral ODA spend on nutrition from 2010-2022. Reports 2010 - 2021 were independently produced by Development Initiatives (which hosted the GNR for several years) through FCDO’s Maximising the Quality of Scaling Up Nutrition Plus, and Technical Assistance to Strengthen Capabilities programmes. The 2022 report was produced by independent consultants through FCDO’s Nutrition Action for Systemic Change programme. The reports detail the methods used in determining these estimates.
FCDO continues to annually assess progress against its nutrition commitments and share the information with the GNR. The data from the 2022 report is what FCDO used to report their progress into the NAF. They were amongst 200 nutrition commitment-making peers invited to report into the NAF for the first time, using the NAF's tools and their own data to do so.
Case Study: FCDO’s nutrition spend
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2022
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2021
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2020
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2019
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2018
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2017
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2016
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2015
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2014
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2013
- FCDO’s Aid Spending for Nutrition 2010-12