At the end of the first week of the 78th World Health Assembly, countries endorsed an important resolution recommitting to tackling malnutrition in mothers, infants, and young children.
This resolution extended the deadline of the WHA nutrition targets from 2025 to 2030, aligning with the timeline and ambition of the Sustainable Development Goals, and added several new and more ambitious targets, such as diversifying diets and improving rates of breastfeeding. The resolution comes at a critical time: Progress against the targets needs immense acceleration.
Yet this comes at a time when public development assistance from donor nations is declining, stretched thin by competing domestic priorities and economic slowdowns. At the same time, governments in the global south, burdened by high debt servicing costs, have limited fiscal space to invest in crucial areas such as nutrition, health, education, and climate resilience. Debt service repayments already exceeded global grantmaking by $50 billion in 2024, even before the dramatic shifts of the past year.