The Global Nutrition Report is a multipartner initiative that provides an independent annual review of countries progress towards meeting intergovernmental nutrition targets and recommends actions to accelerate that progress.
Key findings of the 2016 report include:
- Malnutrition creates a cascade of individual and societal challenges – for example, when one person in a household is obese, the household faces additional annual health care costs equivalent to 8 percent of its annual income. But these costs also represent opportunities for countries to improve the lives of their people by addressing malnutrition.
- The world is off track to reach global targets but there is cause for hope: modest changes could put many countries on course to meet global targets.
- Nutrition is central to the Sustainable Development Goals. Improved nutrition is the platform for progress in health, education, employment, female empowerment, and poverty and inequality reduction. In turn, poverty and inequality, water, sanitation and hygiene, education, food systems, climate change, social protection, and agriculture all have an important impact on nutrition outcomes.
- Current commitments do not match the need. Given the scale of the malnutrition problem the current level of spending – just 2% of total health spending – it is too low.
- Today’s data and knowledge are not sufficient to maximize investments. The report supports the call for a data revolution for nutrition. The scarcity of data prevents us from identifying and learning from real progress at the global and national levels.
The report calls for governments to make the political choice to end all forms of malnutrition, to invest more and to allocate funds more effectively.