Deputy Administrator Isobel Coleman on Building Nutritional Resilience in Food Security

DEPUTY ADMINISTRATOR ISOBEL COLEMAN: Thank you, Ambassador [Jeff] Prescott for hosting me and this discussion here today.

It's a great opportunity to renew our commitment to prioritizing nutrition ahead of the next Nutrition for Growth Summit in Paris next year.

Over just the past five years, we've faced a number of disruptions to global food security: A global pandemic, increasing climate-related disasters, and global food crises exacerbated by Russia's unprovoked war on Ukraine.

Currently, there are 56 active conflicts in the world, the highest number since World War II. Because of this, as we all know, even though humanitarian needs are rising, there are still not nearly enough resources available to meet global needs.

Worldwide, most recent estimates indicate that well over 700 million people are undernourished, lacking adequate food to live healthy, active lives.

It is estimated that a staggering 45 million children under the age of five are experiencing acute malnutrition at any given time, and every year, up to two million of these children die as a result.

Malnutrition devastates every aspect of a child's body. Those who survive experience lasting consequences, robbing them of the ability to live, think, create, and thrive because of lack of access to basic, life-sustaining nutrition.

The United States remains committed to addressing malnutrition in all its forms.

With the scale of child wasting today, we need to make sure that as many children as possible can be reached.

So, we all know we need to get even smarter and more strategic about the way we do this work.

Fortunately, one year ago WHO released new guidelines for child wasting prevention and management which have helped us do just that, providing a helpful framework to update our efforts to combat malnutrition and making us more effective in our work.

For example, the guidelines emphasize the importance of strengthening coordination between WFP and UNICEF for more effective prevention and treatment of moderately wasted children and severely wasted children.

In addition, the guidelines highlight the necessity of prevention programming in addition to treatment - to prevent children from becoming wasted in the first place.

This is not only the most humane approach, but the most strategic and the most cost-effective.

Without appropriate prevention, we know the billions spent today on treatment will continue in perpetuity.

And recognizing the critical role that community healthcare workers already play in meeting local needs, the guidelines empower community health workers with proper training to treat wasting and malnutrition at home - resulting in fewer trips to clinics, and fewer expensive, in-patient stays at government facilities.

The new guidelines also enable us to be more nimble, allowing severely malnourished children who are quickly improving to gradually consume less Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food as they recover, which nutritionists agree is beneficial to a child's long-term health.

This allows us to channel this powerful resource to the children who need it the most.

USAID has been focused on implementing the guidelines' recommendations in order to reach more children - and we've been working hand-in-hand with WFP and UNICEF to develop and implement a joint strategy for phasing in these guidelines in priority humanitarian contexts.

Just last month, USAID provided $100 million to each partner to support those efforts.

The WHO guidelines brought attention to the growing evidence base of nutrition research and helped to identify where we have gaps in evidence still to be filled.

Last week, I announced USAID's first policy paper on Cost-Effectiveness because we have learned from the global body of impact evaluation evidence that there are some programs that deliver extraordinary returns.

I committed the agency to infusing rigorous evidence more broadly and deeply across all our programming to maximize our "impact per dollar."

Today, I am pleased to announce that USAID will host an evidence summit on wasting research in December of this year, which will bring together researchers to discuss the latest findings from nutrition experts and to identify gaps in evidence in order to shape future research.

Following the evidence sometimes requires shifting some of our investments in activities that are demonstrably "good", because the evidence shows we could make greater progress toward the same objectives through other approaches.

It's hard to stop a program that is doing some good, but that's exactly what we need to do when we know we could achieve even more by working in a different way.

This kind of evidence-driven collaboration is an important step toward determining and implementing the most cost-effective malnutrition programming - which we at USAID view as a paramount priority and a moral obligation as we seek to create the greatest impact possible with each dollar we spend.

In closing, I want to thank Special Envoy [Brieuc] Pont for his steadfast leadership in preparing for the next Nutrition for Growth Summit in France next year. The U.S. government is a proud member of the Troika, which brings together hosts of Nutrition for Growth past, present, and future together with the Governments of Japan and France.

In 2021, USAID was proud to put forward a commitment focused on prevention and treatment of childhood wasting.

Going into 2025, we strongly believe this will be a critical opportunity for the entire global nutrition community to recommit to both evidence and action.

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