This briefing describes lessons learnt and implications from a MQSUN assignment which main objective was to analyze the research and policy challenges for improving nutrition governance in a context of state fragility. Efforts to strengthen government commitment to reduce under nutrition in Fragile and Conflict Affected States (FCAS) face a number of context specific challenges:
- First, most nutrition investments tend to adopt short-term humanitarian approaches to tackle food and hunger crises.
- Secondly, FCAS usually lack the capacity to design and implement their own nutrition strategies, thus reinforcing their dependency on the policy advice, technical training and funding from the donor community.
- Thirdly, there are very weak or nonexistent accountability linkages between the state and society in FCAS, so that citizens lack the means to hold their governments to account and political elites lack the incentives to respond to citizens’ demands.
Policy recommendations:
- National governments should evaluate existing nutrition initiatives and aim to orchestrate multiple nutrition responses under a single institutional framework or strategy.
- Donors operating in fragile and conflict affected situations should endorse emergency nutrition responses such as CMAM or blanket feeding that have the greatest potential for embedding preventive care. Cash transfers are another instrument that has greater long-term impact.
- Multilateral and bilateral agencies need to establish ways to combine and fund long term nutrition programming through funds that are allocated on a short-term yearly basis with those that could be allocated through multi year funding. Synchronizing funding cycles could open the door to an effective division of labour and sustained nutrition funding without undermining reporting requirements.
- Donors and country governments need to develop improved budget tracking devices to allow governments greater ownership over nutrition funding while ensuring the accountability of donor contributions. SUN has already developed a costing tool that captures the volume and type of nutrition related expenditure.
