Promoting Diagonal Approach for Nutrition

In a new paper by the Center for Global Development (Asti Shafira, Javier Guzman and JM Keller), the problem of siloeing of international support for basic nutrition is critiqued, with recommendations to integrate nutrition in universal health coverage.

The authors argue that nutrition is underprioritized at present, siloed and funded too often by vertical (stand alone) interventions that run parallel to other health care.  They write that this “makes it harder for governments to coordinate, plan or sustainabily finance nutrition services.”  Meanwhile, horizontal health programs make it harder to track and know about the impact on nutrition.

The author’s recommended solution is for diagonal approaches that embed nutrition interventions within health system strenghening but with measurable results referencing success in diagonal approaches with HIV.  They cite performance based budgeting as a successful approach seen in Indonesia to combat stunting.

Figure 1 from the paper shows, shown here at left, is of funding for nutrition (from the OECD) over the last four years by each of a number of key donor groups.

The full PDF paper can be sourced at:  “Diagonal” Approach to Integrating Nutrition into Health Systems: Opportunities, Challenges, and the Way Forward

or its summary at at Scaling Up Interventions