BRIEFING FOR THE 2014 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON NUTRITION 2

Save the Childrens ICN2

position paper
Context
Adequate nutrition is a human right and delivers an
excellent return on investment as one of the most costeffective areas of intervention for catalysing
development. Despite significant progress in recent
years, every day 805 million people are chronically
undernourished and 162 million children under the age of
five are stunted 51 million children are wasted, and over
two billion people suffer from one or more micronutrient
deficiencies [At the same time,] the number of
overweight or obese children (aged 0 to 5 years) increased
from 31 million globally in 1990 to 44 million in 2012. 1
Background
The International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) 19-21
November 2014 in Rome is jointly organized by the Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health
Organization (WHA). It will bring together ministers and
representatives from 192 governments to demonstrate
their commitment to ending malnutrition in all its forms.
Member states have agreed two conference outcome
documents, 1) a Rome Declaration on Nutrition a
political declaration of intent and 2) a voluntary
Framework for Action (FFA) containing a set of policy
options and strategies for signatories to achieve the
principles of the Rome Declaration.
Key Propositions:
Save the Children is calling for governments to:

Second International Conference on Nutrition (2014). Roundtable 3:

Governance and Accountability for Nutrition. Online: http://www.fao.org/3/aml933e.pdf

1. Make the policies and actions put forward in ICN2

Framework for Action specific and time bound to
ensure implementation.
2. Work through existing initiatives and architecture
for nutrition. For example, the Scaling Up Nutrition
movement should not only be used as a monitoring
and accountability tool, but as a major partner in
implementing ICN2 commitments.
3. Ensure the post-2015 Sustainable Development
Goals hold governments accountable for delivering
on improvements in nutrition for their citizens.
The Conference Outcome Documents
Save the Children values many elements of the Rome
Declaration on Nutrition and Framework for Action.
Specifically Save the Children welcomes Outcome
documents signatories:
1. Stated aim of strengthening existing national
nutrition commitments.
2. Declared motivations moral, human rights and
economic for improving nutrition
3. Call for multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder solutions.
4. Special attention to the nutritional status of
vulnerable groups, especially children, women, and
people in humanitarian emergencies. particularly
establishing
policies
and
strengthening
interventions beginning with adolescent girls and
continuing through pregnancy and lactation.
5. Proposal for a decade of action on nutrition to
deliver 2025 WHA Nutrition targets.
6. Commitment to create an enabling environment
for effective action, especially promise to develop
National Nutrition Plans and national-level multistakeholder mechanisms for food security and
nutrition.
7. Intention to achieve sustainable food systems
promoting healthy diets, with a special attention to
the position of smallholder and family farmers.
8. Commitment to health, WASH and food safety
policies that reduce wasting, stunting and anaemia
in women of reproductive age.

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9. Further inclusion of social and behaviour change

and communications (including interpersonal
communication and media campaigns)
10. Promise of nutrition sensitive social protection
measures
In order to for the New Alliance Food Security Network,
launched at the 2012 G8 summit, to realize its goal to
increase private sector investment in a way that lifts 50
million people out of poverty, reforms are necessary.
Strong transparency and accountability mechanisms must
be established that empower small-scale farmers to be
involved as key partners in designing and implementing
the plans, and track progress. Additionally, to achieve the
desired impact the plans must reduce malnutrition, which
requires that targets and nutrition outcomes are set from
the start. Given the inherently different mandates and
roles between the public and private sector, the G8 must
recognize New Alliance investments as a complement to,
not a replacement for, core public investments in food
security and agriculture.
However, ICN2 does not guarantee a positive outcome for
nutrition. Save the Children maintains the following
concerns, which must be resolved either during the
conference in the follow-up work:
1. A Principle concern is the Frameworks lack of
specific, time-bound, prioritised, detailed, and
measurable recommendations. This will make it very
hard for populations and their civil society
representatives to ensure implementation of
recommendations at the necessary scale. We urge
ICN2 signatories to individually take the floor to
commit to specifics of the FFA, with measurable,
time-bound detail.
2. We doubt that the FFAs recommendations for
accountability will be adequate, especially because
the establishment of national targets, intermediate
milestones and national monitoring frameworks
have been left as voluntary, state-centric processes.
The accountability mechanism will need careful
stewardship, starting with ICN2s Roundtable 3
Governance and Accountability for Nutrition. We
feel accountability can be enhanced if: a) States
commit to establishing (and resourcing) multistakeholder platforms for nutrition, as per
recommendation for enabling environment. b) The
United Nations establishes a formal follow-up
process, requiring state- actors to account for their
progress. C) For the proposed biennial UN
accountability report to be annual and to be done in
conjunction with existing nutrition architecture,
especially the Global Nutrition Report.

3. Save the Children is deeply concerned by the

recommended actions to promote, protect and
support breastfeeding. These priority actions need
to be highlighted and strengthened to ensure the
International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk
Substitutes is adopted (not adapted) into national
law and then enforced and monitored. All reference
to the need for Governments to protect consumers,
especially children, from inappropriate marketing
and publicity must be made in relation to drinks as
well as food. Member states should bring their
maternity leave policies into line with the
International Labour Organization (ILO) minimum
recommendation.
4. Neither Outcome document explains ICN2s fit with
the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. A
concerted effort is needed to ensure a positive
outcome is taken-forwards from ICN2s Roundtable 1
Nutrition in the Post-2015 Development Agenda.
5. The United Nations has not detailed how all its
nutrition related agencies, funds and programmes
will coordinate their future work. We will call for
these concerns to be addressed, starting with ICN2s
Roundtable 3: Governments and Accountability for
Nutrition.
6. The nutritional status of adolescents has relatively
not been prioritised. We will call on our Civil
Society Parents help ensure adolescents are
recognised, alongside other vulnerable groups, as an
essential
constituency
for
breaking
the
intergenerational cycle of undernutrition.
7. There is a lack of information for the proposed
decade of action on nutrition. It will now be
important to influence these plans to ensure they do
not lack the necessary ambition to deliver WHA 2025
Global Nutrition Targets.
8. The Scaling Up Nutrition movement (SUN) was not
mentioned as a means for creating an enabling
environment for action or ensuring accountability for
commitments. In this way, ICN2 risks duplicating
existing nutrition architecture and may violate the
Do No Harm principle governments do not need
competing National Nutrition Plans and Nutrition
Action Plans. Instead, initiatives should support
existing efforts to scale up nutrition.
9. There is a relative dearth of recommendations for
nutrition specific interventions, particularly a failure
to recommend all ten cost-effective interventions
evidenced in the Lancet (2013) Maternal and Child
Nutrition.
10. Its lamentable that member states missed an
opportunity to specify the level of increased
investments needed to eradicate malnutrition. It is
also a failure of the declaration not to put a timeframe on its goals.

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11. The recommended actions for wasting miss the

opportunity to promote the improvement of
identification and measurement of wasting both for
curative and preventative purposes.
12. Social protection recommendations need to target
interventions at the 1,000 day window and
incorporate empowerment activities for women and
adolescent girls. Furthermore, consideration must be
also given to achieving sustainable livelihoods and
behaviour change through national social protection
systems.
Specific comments on the Political Declaration:
1. We agree that food and agriculture systems need to
be addressed comprehensively through coordinated
public policies but this should be done with the aim
of making food more nutritious.
2. Similarly, we support the Political Declarations
statement that responsible investments in
agriculture
are
essential
for
overcoming
malnutrition. However, we feel that the Political
Declaration should go further and detail how this
should be done. E.g through national multi-sector
platforms, governments integrating nutrition targets
and indicators into agriculture plans and initiatives
such as Grow Africa including nutrition targets.
Save the Children would like to thank the organisers of
ICN2 for all of their hard work in putting together the
conference. Save the Children looks forward to
working with the organisers and ICN2 signatories in
implementing the commitments made during this
important moment.

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