This moment requires us to re-think aid to nutrition—both how funds are raised and how they are best spent. We call on global development partners, governments, and funders to:

1. Restore implementation of life-saving nutrition interventions. Funding SAM programs (including the supporting services, staff, and infrastructure on which they rely) is an urgent priority, given their life-saving nature. This support must include not only RUTF production and distribution but also screening, caregiver education, and community-based management of acute malnutrition, including prevention of relapse. Priority should be placed on humanitarian hotspots, such as Sudan, where deaths are already occurring due to disruptions.
2. Enable, incentivize, and support governments to scale-up evidence-based essential nutrition programs to prevent malnutrition across health, food, and social protection systems. This includes, for example, policies to increase the demand for healthy and sustainable diets, increasing the coverage of antenatal care and micronutrient supplementation for pregnant women, promoting breastfeeding and optimal infant and young child feeding, ensuring vitamin A supplementation in vulnerable populations, and scaling up large-scale food fortification. Such programs are the best investment for preventing malnutrition and will reap greater long-term returns than focusing solely on treating acute malnutrition.
3. Diversify nutrition funding sources, domestic and international. The development and humanitarian system, including for nutrition, has become too dependent on a small number of donors, particularly the US government – reducing resilience and exacerbating the impacts of the present shock. It is important to diversify sources in the future. One option for doing so may be challenging development finance institutions to increase funding for nutrition programs. Another could be repurposing agricultural subsidies. There is also potential to leverage funding from outside the nutrition sector by accelerating efforts to make agricultural, workforce, and climate investments more “nutrition smart.” This could entail, for example, ensuring agricultural investments focus on nutritious foods; building alliances with climate champions to reduce food loss; and finding new ways of financing small- and medium-sized enterprises to improve access to locally produced nutritious foods.
4. Rebuild and strengthen critical nutrition data and monitoring systems. Critical data systems like FEWS-NET need to be restored, but with ever-evolving technologies, this is also an area for innovation. More can likely be done with fewer resources by using innovative and lower-cost technologies (such as satellite imaging, artificial intelligence-powered predictive analytics, and crowdsourcing) to guide timely responses to food crises, improve routine tracking systems, and provide data to monitor and evaluate longer-term nutrition interventions.

Failure to act, and to do so quickly, will result in not only a dramatic increase in child mortality but also long-term societal damage that will reverberate across generations. It is imperative that global development partners, governments, and donors mobilize immediately to safeguard nutrition for the world’s most vulnerable populations. Our collective future depends on it.