With 159 million children under five suffering from stunting, 50 million from wasting, and nearly 2 billion adults from obesity, malnutrition is a global problem. To promote further action, transparency, and accountability toward improving nutrition, IFPRI and its partners, including USAID and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), developed and published the inaugural Global Nutrition Report in 2014, with updated information on countries’ progress released in 2015 and 2016.
The Global Nutrition Report is the first of its kind—an independent, thought-provoking, and comprehensive report card on the world’s nutrition at the global, regional, and national levels. Since 2014, the report has been contributing to efforts toward the World Health Assembly (WHA) Goals for 2025. For example, in countries where the report shows significant progress, political resolve to end child malnutrition was reinforced.
Kenya’s first lady expressed great pride in the country’s commitment to meeting nutrition targets in exclusive breastfeeding, child obesity, child stunting, and child wasting during the launch of the 2016 Global Nutrition Report in the country. The report has also informed the strategies of numerous governments and international organizations, such as the United Nations Global Nutrition Agenda, released in 2015, and USAID’s “Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Strategy 2014–2025: Technical Guidance Brief on the Role of Nutrition in Ending Preventable Child and Maternal Deaths.” The credible and transparent measures presented by the report helped promote a culture of accountability in meeting the WHA goals. In 2015, the then-interim SUN Movement coordinator stated that the report is one of the important advances in the fight against malnutrition because it creates a standard measure to evaluate progress.
