SCN News No 36 - UNSCN

www.unsystem.org/scn FEATURES 27
emerge from the country examples highlighted; key enabling conditions can be summarized as follows:
• Strong government action coordinated across central, state, and local levels; and across sectors;
• Leadership at the highest level to ensure attention across branches of government and regions;
• Inclusion of vulnerable groups and their communities in terms of mobilization and information sharing;
• A strong monitoring and evaluation culture that provides a basis for incentives and correction of policy
actions in the context of implementation;
• Significant scaling up of public spending.
Conclusions
The nutrition community rightly focuses on the short routes to improving nutrition; the Lancet Series confirms
that implementing a given set of targeted nutrition interventions, at scale, will result in substantial reductions
in maternal and child undernutrition, mortality and disability in the short term. The urgency of achieving these
goals is irrefutable. However, the focus on targeted nutrition interventions should not preclude investing in
developing the foundations and the enabling environment that will allow nutrition gains to be maintained in
the long term and in a sustainable way. This will require a more aggressive involvement of the nutrition
community in strategies to address the underlying determinants of undernutrition. This inevitably will involve
working more effectively across sectors. The nutrition community needs to be more involved and more
forceful in positioning nutrition within the larger social development context. This will require working to
improve nutrition not only through health, but also through agriculture and rural development, water and
sanitation, education, gender, and social policy, social protection and poverty reduction strategies and
programmes. Nutrition provides an opportunity to overcome some of the traditional sectoral divides, and for
collaborative approaches to be designed and implemented. Clearly, the complexity of such inter-sectoral
efforts has discouraged many in the past. But in current times, with the globalization of the food system,
climate change, and the current food and fuel price crisis, we have no choice but to try again, with innovative
approaches and new energy. And this time, we need to better document successes; we need to document
not just impact, but impact pathways using well defined programme theory framework; and we need to better
understand the policy processes and the political and social conditions that contribute to nutrition impact. In
sum, we need strategies that effectively integrate long and short routes to improved nutrition, are multisectoral
in nature, address the lifecycle, and are carefully monitored and evaluated to facilitate replication and
scaling up.
Contact: m.ruel@cgiar.org
References
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