Sustainable financing for nutrition ensures improving nutrition stays a top priority. It occurs when nutrition activities and investments are incorporated into government-managed budgets and backed by predictable financing from domestic revenues. While guidance for national budget tracking and costing for nutrition has been developed by the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement and Strengthening Partnerships, Results, and Innovations in Nutrition (SPRING) to advance domestic investment and accountability, how do we best incorporate transition and financing considerations into USAID nutrition programming to increase the sustainability of USAID investments?

To address this key area of sustainability planning, USAID Advancing Nutrition developed an overall theoretical framework for sustainable financing for nutrition and guidance on how USAID Missions and implementing partners can ensure USAID nutrition activities can be transferred to local plans, systems, and domestic resources. This guidance focuses on the USAID activity design and implementation, and monitoring, evaluation, and learning as strategic points for USAID to align with country governments. We aim to encourage Mission staff and implementers to consider aspects of their interventions that may help ensure long-term sustainable financing of their nutrition activities. By targeting nutrition activities, this guidance complements USAID’s ongoing efforts to finance self-reliance, which advances a host country’s ability to finance its own development plans and strategies.

During this interactive webinar, speakers presented recommendations based on a literature review on transition of development assistance to domestic financing, and consultations with USAID Missions, implementing partners and government counterparts working on nutrition planning and programming. Colleagues working on nutrition activities in different countries were invited to share their experiences in designing nutrition programs to ensure that interventions will continue and be smoothly incorporated into government-managed budgets after project funding ends.

Webinar Recording

Webinar Resources

• Access the Slide Deck (PDF, 628 KB)
• View webinar transcript (PDF, 258 KB)

Speakers

Natasha Ledlie, MPP (Moderator), is an international development professional with over eight years of experience conducting research and studying the gendered impact of nutrition, agriculture and social protection programs on reducing poverty in low- and middle-income countries. As a senior program officer on the global nutrition practice at Results for Development, Natasha works on projects related to nutrition financing and evidence-based decision-making.

Helen Connolly, PhD, is a Principal Economist at AIR and has more than 30 years of experience in economic research and evaluation and has supported projects across the globe. She is experienced in methodologies of the evaluation of health, nutrition, income, gender equality, and poverty. She has worked with country governments and with USAID, UNICEF, World Bank, and SUN in developing national nutrition plans and supporting improvements in public finance for nutrition (PF4N).

Debora Niyeha, Chief of Party at USAID Advancing Nutrition, has over fourteen years of experience in program implementation, management, and oversight specifically in areas of health and nutrition, food security, food fortification, and large-scale evaluation of health and nutrition policies and programs. Debora has worked as Nutrition Lead and Program Manager for RISE RCT at Helen Keller International in Tanzania. In her previous role, she managed the nutrition portfolio and provided technical and managerial support in the implementation of the RCT project with interventions targeting 1000 days.

Tomas Lievens is an experienced social policy economist with expertise in quantitative research and mixed research methods, health and nutrition, education and WASH financing, health insurance, as well as education and health labour markets. Much of his work focuses on public systems and expenditure performance with a special interest in equity in financing and outcomes. He is the Partner in charge of the recently established Human Development Practice at Genesis Analytics.