2. Global Action and Coordination on Nutrition
The 1,000 Days effort is intended to catalyze action on
SUN in countries that express a commitment to scale up
maternal and child nutrition—with the goal of achieving
measurable results during the 1,000-day period September 2010 to June 2013.
• The Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement builds
on the momentum created by the series in The Lancet
and the growing response to the global food price crisis.
The SUN movement is a collaborative process that provides principles and direction for increased support for
• Leadership at the country level: As of December 2011,
countries as they scale up their efforts to tackle maternal
22 countries, including a majority of the 36 nations with
and child undernutrition across a range of sectors and
the highest rates of childhood stunting, had identified
stakeholders (developing countries, donors and multithemselves as SUN countries.16 SUN countries have belateral institutions, civil society organizations, academic
gun to develop individual national nutrition strategies
institutions, and the private sector). The SUN movethat include nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive acment’s main role is to empower and support action at
tion items. Each government has appointed a high-level
country level by mobilizing resources, aligning efforts,
representative to coordinate the implementation of the
and supporting leadership and advocacy at the internastrategy across ministries. In addition, countries are estional level. The Scaling Up Nutrition Framework for Actablishing working groups to coordinate actions among
tion, released in April 2010, has been endorsed by more
key stakeholders, including representatives of the govthan 100 organizations. The SUN Framework13 helped
ernment, donors, development banks, international
establish a consensus on how best to ensure significant
organizations, civil society, and business. Malawi and
and sustained reductions in undernutrition during the
Ghana have now launched formal SUN and 1,000 Days
1,000-day window. The Framework advocates both nuinitiatives.
trition-sensitive and nutrition-specific interventions in
addition to emphasizing the need for long-term advoca- 3. Political Will and Commitment to Prioritize
cy and mobilization for action. The nutrition-sensitive
Maternal and Child Nutrition in U.S. Foreign
interventions seek to promote adequate nutrition as the
Assistance Programs
goal of national development policies in agriculture,
Over the past three years, the U.S. government has profood security, social protection, health, education, rural
vided high-level political support and pledged additional
development, and emergency programs. Nutrition-specific interventions have nutrition improvement as their resources for nutrition. These efforts include using U.S. leadership to leverage resources from other donors, integrating
primary goal.
The Scaling Up Nutrition Roadmap, published in nutrition into other sectors, and confronting some of the key
September 2010, makes the case that government lead- barriers to scaling up as needed to achieve the MDGs.
In 2009, an early priority for the Obama administration
ers and development partners should build political
was responding to the significant rise in hunger caused by
will and take action to improve
nutrition. It also identifies inFigure 1 Building Country Scale-Up Platforms for Nutrition through
vestments that have been shown
Global Initiatives
to work well when implemented
UNICEF
within the context of nutritionfocused development policies.
GAFSP
SUN encourages the participaU.S. Global
tion of multi-sectoral stakeholdPEPFAR
Health Initiative
ers to rapidly scale up effective,
evidence-based actions at the
Dept. of State/USAID
WHO –
Opportunity
Landscape Analysis on Countries’
country level.14
Readiness to Accelerate Action
PMI
Strengthenin