SCN News No 36 - UNSCN

www.unsystem.org/scn FEATURES 49
significant role in improving nutritional well-being – beyond their role in increasing overall food production.
As the penultimate question, respondents were asked how they would spend an additional $50 million on nutrition
in developing countries, and were permitted three priorities among 10 choices, plus the opportunity for
write-in votes. When the first, second and third priorities were added together, maternal and child care and
behavioral change communications received the most votes, 67.0% and 62.5%, respectively (Table 3).
Finally, respondents were asked to score, on a 1-to-5 scale, specific organizations or groups of organizations
on how well they have served the field of nutrition, relative to standards the respondents themselves would
have set for them. When this same question was asked 10 years ago, the scores were those presented in
Table 4. UNICEF was first, followed surprisingly by a then quite young organization, the Micronutrient Initiative.
International NGOs and IFPRI were nearly tied in the third and fourth positions. At the bottom of this list:
private foundations, two UN technical agencies and private consulting organizations.
The scores in the current survey, with a couple of additional organizations added, are also presented in Table
4, along with the change in score. UNICEF, although down a bit, again tops the list with an average score of
3.78. And, once again, the Micronutrient Initiative has come in second, even closer to the top spot, with a
score of 3.72. International NGOs and IFPRI retain their third and fourth slots. On the bottom of the list, we
find the World Bank and GAIN and, once again, consulting firms and FAO, this time with the latter two switching
positions, but with both registering higher scores than in the earlier survey.
Concluding remarks
Taken as a whole, the international nutrition community is optimistic about its mission and about its future,
and is cognizant and appreciative of the research done in the past to elucidate the consequences of malnutrition
and the relationships between nutrition and particular communicable diseases. But it believes that primary
attention in the future needs to be given not to further refinement of these research findings on causality
and consequences but rather to:
• effective high-level advocacy, utilizing the powerful evidence already available,
• generation of adequate resources to properly address malnutrition, and
• improved management and implementation at scale of our programs, with particular attention to opportunities
for community participation.
And so let us return to Dr. Horwitz and to the remarkable optimism of those working in this field – an optimism
that may be quite surprising to some of us, given what we as a community have experienced over the decades
– but which probably would not have been so surprising to Dr. Horwitz. He would have pointed quickly
to the increased understanding of the effect that malnutrition is having on mortality and on illness, and, in
turn, its negative effect on national development. He would have noted the attention given to nutrition in the
formulation of the Millennium Development Goals, the high premium placed on micronutrients by the Copenhagen
Consensus, and the high profile identification of the importance of nutrition recently, for instance, in the
statement of India’s Prime Minister on that country’s 60th Independence Day, and the placing of nutrition for
the first time on the agenda of the most recent Economic Summit in Davos. Dr. Horwtiz would have enumerated
for us the rapid increase in attractive and efficacious nutrition intervention opportunities that have
emerged in recent years, from the proliferation of options to address micronutrient deficiencies in young children,
to newborn vitamin A supplementation, to double fortified salt. He would have lauded the increasing
attention now finally being directed to the long-recognized importance of the nutritional well-being of children
under the age of two. We would guess, at the same time, that he would continue to lament the management
and implementation shortfalls, which so often constrain the effectiveness of technically sound programs when
they are taken to scale.
Overall, however, we believe he would have been pleased with the community for having navigated at least
some of the rapids, for having had to learn to swim upstream in the process, for having realized some notable
successes, perhaps particularly in mobilizing communities, and also for having explicitly recognized the challenges
that lay ahead.
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