From April 16-18, 2024, Cape Town, South Africa served as the meeting place for a Convening of Large-Scale Food Fortification Practitioners. Over three days, 245 participants representing 100 organizations, including governmental bodies, regional economic communities, United Nations organizations, donors, civil society, academia, and the private sector, engaged in intensive dialogue and productive working sessions. The primary focus of this convening was to address barriers to progress in large scale food fortification and outline critical steps to propel its action forward.
A Collaborative Action Panel, comprising ten professionals from diverse organizations and backgrounds with extensive experience in large-scale food fortification, was assembled and tasked with distilling the high-level findings, insights, and objectives from this Convening. The result is a compelling ‘Manifesto for Accelerated Action’.
As we near the one-year anniversary of the passing of the World Health Assembly resolution to “Accelerate efforts for preventing micronutrient deficiencies and their consequences, including spina bifida and other neural tube defects, through safe and effective food fortification” and as the global community readies itself for the Nutrition for Growth Summit in March 2025, this Manifesto serves as a strategic guidepost. It captures the collective ambition of the practitioners and organizations present at the convening, offering ten substantial evidence-based recommendations to steer stakeholders’ commitments from now until 2030.
Illustration credit: Patti Dobrowolski
