For the Long Haul: Financing Sustained Commitment to Nutrition

Funding for nutrition is critical to the success of a national nutrition policy, but the multi-sectoral nature of nutrition makes planning and budgeting for nutrition funding challenging. Because nutrition does not comprise its own sector and is typically embedded in other sectors, it is constantly competing for funds within other focus areas (such as health, agriculture, education, water and sanitation, and others). Also, nutrition activities are often funded through larger, integrated budget items, which makes tracking funds difficult. These challenges mean that governments and their partners must make a conscious effort to build budget and expenditure tracking systems (also called financial tracking systems) for nutrition to manage and sustain commitment to the cause. In this technical brief, we review some of the global guidance countries can refer to for buildingsustainable, predictable funding mechanisms for nutrition and share some of what we have found thus far on current capacities and systems strengthening efforts for nutrition financing in the two case study countries.