On Saturday, June 8  Britain along with the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), and the Government of Brazil convened the Nutrition for Growth: Beating Hunger through Business and Science summit. An all-day affair experts and world leaders touted the importance of putting nutrition on the global agenda in the lead-up to the G8 summit which the UK will also host. Without an urgent scaled nutrition effort more children will die from undernutrition and will suffer from stunting which we now know is irreversible. The adult labor force in low and middle income countries will also suffer from low productivity, a critical factor when working to reach global development goals for the advancement of these countries.

90 stakeholders including 24 countries, NGOS and private sector companies signed a global agreement, the Global Nutrition for Growth Compact, to tackle world malnutrition. The first step, according to the Compact, is to ensure that at least 500 million pregnant women and children under two are reached with effective nutrition interventions, reduce the number of children under five stunted by at least 20 million, and to save the lives of at least 1.7 million children under 5 by preventing stunting, increasing breastfeeding, and increasing treatment of severe acute malnutrition. (See the Compact in PDF).

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Additionally over $4.15 billion dollars in new commitments were made to drastically improve malnutrition rates by 2020. You can read the entire list of commitments in the  Nutrition for Growth Commitments: Executive Summary. Now that the commitments have been made it’s – as always – only a matter if they will all be honored.

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You can follow the conversation at #nutritionforgrowth.

Photo: United Nations