The Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Year of Action Launch Event last December marked the beginning of a year-long effort to galvanize action for nutrition. Ending malnutrition in all its forms by 2030, a target set forth by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the UN Call to Action on Nutrition prompted this global initiative, creating an opportunity for individuals, communities, government stakeholders, and global leaders to step up to the challenge of ensuring everyone has access to safe, affordable and nutritious foods.
Culminating a Year of Action on nutrition, punctuated by the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit and Summit, the N4G Summit brought together stakeholders from across sectors to mobilize financial and political commitments for nutrition. The event took place in Tokyo from December 7-8, 2021. Three focus areas guided commitment-making at the Summit—
- Health: Integrating nutrition into Universal Health Coverage.
- Food: Transforming the food system, so it promotes safe, sustainable, and healthy foods to support people and planet.
- Resilience: Effectively addressing malnutrition in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, supporting resiliency.
In addition to securing commitments for nutrition, the N4G Summit highlighted the critical role food, health, and humanitarian systems play in delivering good nutrition for everyone. At USAID Advancing Nutrition, we examine individuals at each level of these systems, including planners, implementers, providers or clients and consumers. What each person does as an individual—and collectively in groups, communities, and institutions—matters for nutrition outcomes. Drawing insights from experiences, as well as social and behavioral sciences, can help us better support people seeking to make a positive impact on their own systems and environment.
Learn more about USAID Advancing Nutrition’s work in social and behavior change:
- Building on partner experiences and lessons learned, USAID Advancing Nutrition is developing a suite of practical tools to harmonize design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of nutrition SBC programs in food and health systems.
- In collaboration with Cornell University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, our technical experts examined peer-reviewed literature on interventions targeting family members for improved maternal and child nutrition.
- USAID Advancing Nutrition recognizes an important need to understand and take into account how gender impacts agricultural outputs, healthy diets, and nutritional status
- .UNICEF and USAID Advancing Nutrition, with the support of the Infant Feeding in Emergencies Core Group, have developed a counselling package, Infant and Young Child Feeding Recommendations when COVID-19 is Suspected or Confirmed, to ensure that communities and families around the world adopt these recommendations to help prevent the spread of the virus and care for those who are infected.