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Strengthening strategic capacity for nutrition in four African countries (632.14)

Undernutrition has received significant attention at global and national levels in recent years, as evidenced by the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement with 43 participating countries and a G8 commitment of $4.2 billion to the Nutrition for Growth initiative, among others. The translation of this attention into effective action at the country level poses many challenges, as documented previously. Here we describe the results of an on‐going action research effort to address these challenges by strengthening strategic capacity in four Africa countries: Burkina Faso, Mali, Ethiopia and Uganda. All four of these countries have developed multisectoral national nutrition policies and/or plans of action, created coordinating committees and identified SUN focal points. Further multisectoral progress faces challenges seen elsewhere, such as the dominance of sectoral goals and incentives, uneven understanding of multisectoral roles, responsibilities and leadership; uneven participation and ownership; weak human and institutional capacities; lack of effective sub‐national multisectoral platforms; and the persistence of unaligned donor‐ and NGO‐driven approaches. Initial efforts to address these challenges by facilitating informal strategic and adaptive management approaches reveals second order constraints such as high turnover of key staff in and out of government, heavy workloads, rigidity and risk avoidance. Ongoing work focuses on formation of strategic alliances, leadership development, the strengthening of sub‐national experiences to inform the design of multisectoral strategies at the national level and strengthening linkages with global initiatives.