Save the Children International

London 2013

Nutrition- specific total (US$): 85,000,000

Nutrition- sensitive total (US$): 590,000,000

Reported progress

2013:

Nutrition-specific disbursements: US$7,348,653

Nutrition-sensitive disbursements: US$60,469,436

2015:

Nutrition-specific disbursements: US$2,356,620

Nutrition-sensitive disbursements: US$78,843,442

2016:

Nutrition-specific disbursements: US$33,655,164

Nutrition-sensitive disbursements: US$36,038,892

2017:

Nutrition-specific disbursements: US$7,821,799.04

Nutrition-sensitive disbursements: US$63,814,471

2018:

Nutrition-specific

Commitments: US$14,239,697

Disbursements: US$10,966,148

Nutrition-sensitive

Commitments: US$78,315,347

Disbursements: US$63,814,471

London 2013

1. Chair SUN Civil Society Network (CSN).

2. Partnership with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), Secure Nutrition on Innovations in Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture.

Reported progress

Commitment: Save the Children will invest in top-class research, building evidence of what works, underpinning our advocacy for sustainable change at scale, including innovative approaches, such as using community-produced videos to promote dietary diversity and cell phones to support antenatal care during pregnancy.

Our nutrition programmes have continued to focus on the delivery of evidence-based interventions by ensuring adequate food and nutrient intake in pregnant and lactating women and young children, as well as effective infant and child feeding and care practices, and protection against infectious diseases. We continue to foster collaboration across sectors, such as through integrating early childhood development activities within our maternal, child and newborn health, nutrition and early learning interventions. We continue to roll out evidenced-based guidance on Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF), which will allow us to continue to building the quality of scale of our response to infants and young children and improve their nutritional status, in emergency, recovery and development settings. For example:

- We are leading an implementation research on quality of nutrition and pneumonia counselling and care provided by Community Health Volunteers in Integrated Community Case Management (ICCM) in Kenya.

- Through a project on nutrition during 1,000 days in Niger, Kenya, Malawi and Burkina Faso, we are providing nutrition, livelihood and food/cash transfers primarily for poor and poorest households, including vulnerable individuals such as children at risk of malnutrition, adolescents and individuals with disabilities.

- Our Global Malnutrition Initiative aims to galvanise increased action to treat and prevent acute malnutrition in up to five fragile and conflict-affected countries, starting with Kenya, Somalia and Yemen from November 2018. The initiative is using a dual approach, supporting delivery and scale-up of proven lifesaving nutrition interventions while generating evidence on new approaches to maximise service coverage, through community-based treatment as part of the ICCM package and understanding and preventing post-treatment relapse. The initiative prioritises systems strengthening and national advocacy to influence broader change and sustain actions. Funded so far by Save the Children UK private funds and a UK-based Appeals Board, the initiative has an ambitious fundraising target. The initiative draws on global and national humanitarian, development and advocacy teams, and existing programmes.

- Our Cost of the Diet (CotD) software and tool continues to be used by development partners and governments around the world to inform nutrition policies and programmes, and better understand the relationship between poverty and diets. The CotD is an open source software which uses linear programming to calculate the amount and combination of locally available foods needed to meet a typical familys nutritional needs at the lowest cost. It is used to estimate the cost of a nutritious diet, the extent to which families can afford a nutritious diet, and to model and identify the most effective interventions to improve the affordability of a nutritious diet in different contexts. The World Food Programme is currently using the CotD to inform national nutrition strategies and plans through their Fill the Nutrient Gap Framework; and Save the Children and other development partners are using it to estimate the size of cash transfers, identify low cost nutritious foods to promote or grow, or advocate for more support for poor families. During the Covid-19 crisis we are adapting and piloting CotD analysis along with Household Economy Analysis (HEA) to monitor trends in affordability of nutritious diets and the indirect impact of Covid-19 on food security and malnutrition. The CotD software is supported through Save the Children private funding with studies funded through projects and programmes.

Commitment: Working with the World Bank and GAIN, Save the Children will host a new competition to stimulate innovation and best practice in nutrition-sensitive agriculture.

The nutrition-sensitive agriculture competition was successfully delivered with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the World Bank in 2014. Save the Children continues to work with GAIN in a number of ways, including: collaboration through the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement (GAIN host the SUN Business Network); programmatic partnerships; and as contributors to the Global Nutrition Report Stakeholder Group and the Nutrition for Growth Advisory Group. In 2019, Save the Children and GAIN collaborated with the SUN Youth Leaders for Nutrition to develop a Youth Leaders Nutrition Advocacy Toolkit with focus on adolescent nutrition.

A Strategic Partnership Framework was signed between Save the Children and the World Bank Group in December 2018, articulating the shared vision of both organisations and mutual commitment to accelerate and extend activities and impact across programmes, knowledge, evidence generation and advocacy. The framework aims to: (1) strengthen programme quality, especially in fragile and conflict-/violence-affected settings; ensure equitable access to essential basic services for the most marginalised and vulnerable communities; improve programme targeting and effectiveness, bolster resilience, build strong on-the-ground capacity and protect children from conflict, violence and disease; (2) generate evidence and new knowledge to influence global and national-level policies and priorities and inform scale-up; and (3) use each organisations respective channels and networks to amplify messages and bring key stakeholders together.

Save the Children is committed to building evidence on the impact and most effective approaches to deliver nutrition-sensitive interventions and programmes. For example:

- In Bangladesh, Save the Children is working in partnership with Helen Keller International, WorldFish and International Development Enterprises with support from the EU and DFID to implement a six-year nutrition food security and livelihood programme (2015-2022) targeting 220,000 poor in Sylhet and Moulvibazar districts of Bangladesh. A rigorous evaluation is conducted in parallel by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) to evaluate the programmes impact on stunting and other nutrition outcomes. In Myanmar and Nigeria, we have generated evidence on the impact of and best approach to deliver maternal and child cash transfers and social and behaviour change interventions to prevent stunting with funding from DFID and the Livelihoods and Food Security Fund (LIFT).

- In Mali, we completed a cluster randomised trial to evaluate the impact of micronutrient powders delivered alongside seasonal malaria chemoprevention and early childhood development on nutrition and child development outcomes with the World Bank Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund and in partnership with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Institut National de Recherche en Sant Publique (INRSP) and other partners. In Malawi, we completed another cluster randomised trial with the International Food Policy Research Institute, Chancellor College and the DFID/PATH Nutrition Embedding Evaluation Programme (NEEP) to evaluate the impact of an integrated nutrition, agriculture and early child development (ECD) intervention on agriculture, nutrition and child development outcomes.Government of IndonesiaGovernment of Indonesia Government of Indonesia Government of Indonesia

- In Indonesia, a new five-year partnership with Power of Nutrition and Nutrition International was launched in 2019 to reduce stunting in West Java and East Nusa Tengara, with a strong focus on community and health system strengthening and evidence generation.

Commitment: Save the Children will continue to advocate for political leadership, holding leaders to account for their commitments through our representation on national nutrition forums such as in India, Tanzania and Nigeria and will campaign for commitments and targets to prevent stunting at the national level, to ensure the equitable delivery of nutrition interventions, and the integration of nutrition in social protection policies and food production.

Save the Children continues to mobilise a coalition of champions and resources, at national and global levels, towards our goal of ending malnutrition. In 2019 and into 2020, we led civil society engagement in the development of the Tokyo Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit 2020, working closely with both Southern and Northern CSOs via the SUN Civil Society Network (CSN) and International Coalition for Advocacy on Nutrition (ICAN), and as a civil society representative on the Government of Japans N4G Advisory Group. Many of our country offices, including in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Indonesia, are involved and engaging with their national nutrition forums. Through this work, we built global political will to make an ambitious and meaningful summit happen; advocated for key issues to be on the agenda, including UHC/nutrition integration, nutrition in fragile and conflict-affected settings, and Leave No One Behind; and secured civil society space both for the preparations and the Summit itself, and agreement of Principles of Engagement for all stakeholders that help protect child rights. The Summit has been postponed due to the impacts of Covid-19, but our efforts will continue to ensure a successful N4G in December 2021.

Commitment: As chair of the SUN CSN, Save the Children will work with partners to support the development of new civil society platforms to advocate for fair and practical approaches and strong political leadership on nutrition.

Save the Children continues to host the SUN CSN. The SUN CSN now represents over 3,000 national, regional and international organisations and networks spanning multiple sectors, and 53 national civil society alliances.

The SUN CSN supports its members by accessing funding, sharing learning and building capacity. It accelerates civil society alliance establishment, strong governance structures, effective advocacy approaches and high-quality action through cross-learning. SUN CSN members have expertise in a variety of areas, including health, agriculture, womens empowerment, social protection, water and sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and many more.

Save the Children has held the role of vice-chair of the network since June 2014. A key achievement in the period Jan. 2019-May 2020 was Save the Childrens work in supporting the SUN CSN Secretariat to enable 102 civil society representatives from 57 countries to attend the 2019 SUN Movement Global Gathering in Kathmandu, Nepal.