Q&A: For donors, investing in nutrition is 'pure economics'

WASHINGTON — Donors must change the way they interact with partner governments, said Tatjana von Steiger Weber, deputy head of domain global cooperation at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. As the global community looks toward meeting the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, she said agencies like her own must move away from models that support the implementation of prescribed solutions without input of local government and civil society. The Scaling Up Nutrition Movement is one example of a way to create a platform where all stakeholders — even those with different views — can engage productively to solve problems, she said. SUN promotes a country-led approach to improving nutrition outcomes with a focus on the first 1,000 days from conception through age 2. It has advocated for coordinated global action to achieve SDG 2 and end both under and overnutrition. “An idea that we have developed with regards to SDG 6 is a twinning approach, meaning that a country from the north and a country from the south and respectively a municipality from the north and a municipality from the south would team up together,” von Steiger Weber said. “That could be an idea also when it comes to the discussion to broaden the membership of the SUN countries to include also countries from the north when it comes to addressing all forms of malnutrition because that way you show this is a universal issue.” “The inclination to come and say ‘that’s good for you’ is almost natural because it’s with all good intentions, but I think then the issue of the sustainability of your interventions is really problematic.” --— Tatjana von Steiger Weber Following the recent SUN Global Gathering, von Steiger Weber spoke with Devex about the international wake-up call to the importance of more coordinated action on nutrition, why partner countries must lead, and how together with the private sector donor agencies can mobilize more domestic resources to improve nutrition outcomes. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Why is it important for donors to be engaged on nutrition? In the end, the figures speak for themselves. If you engage in nutrition, this has a huge impact on the development of human capital. If you do not invest in good nutrition, you know that human capital is going to be weak, or weaker, and thus the overall development is also much slower. It’s pure economics in the end. Is the mobilization around nutrition with the help of SUN new for your agency? SUN is not that old yet. We were rather late in mobilizing all the efforts and actors in regards to the importance of investment in good nutrition, also through development agencies or through donors. This focus of the donor community back in the early times of development cooperation has been that very much — our agency was among those who promoted agricultural production. If you look at the first development agency, there were economists and those who study agriculture. But this awareness of good nutrition, the food crisis in 2008, it was like a wake-up call that we need to mobilize all the forces that have been investing before that, but maybe not in such a concerted and not the most strategic way. It’s not just about investing into nutrition as a single sector or as a single item. It’s this notion they came up with in 2010, of the idea of a movement stipulating that you have to mobilize all the actors that have an impact towards one common goal and one common vision. But once you mobilize all these different actors and stakeholders, you don’t just remain within your own community. You already step out of your own little garden and comfort zone, acknowledging that it requires a more systemic approach. With the 2030 agenda, this was then confirmed at the larger scale that we need to really develop much more interdisciplinary approaches and multisectoral approaches: multisectoral approaches to multistakeholder engagement. That was then just reinforced by the 2030 agenda. And so nutrition, if we just would keep it in the realm of the health or food security community, we would still not succeed. How can donors support SUN countries in reaching SDG 2 and nutrition indicators? We as donors are also really challenged in one thing: We also have to change a bit the way we’ve been doing business and how we were perceiving ourselves in regards to the partner countries. We’ve been the ones that, based on our own proper development, we came with the recipes. Especially in our bilateral cooperation, this is still a challenge. We are engaging in the contexts — and more and more so — which are really struggling and where very often you definitely don’t have a functioning government as a partner. The inclination to come and say “that’s good for you” is almost natural because it’s with all good intentions, but I think then the issue of the sustainability of your interventions is really problematic. Thus we really have to focus our support in terms of enhancing the capacities of our partners. And there SUN is great, as it provides this platform of different stakeholders [with] very different interests also — sometimes competing, conflicting. But that again you already have a platform you can turn to and create a safe space to have a discussion on these differences to understand the other side. It’s about ensuring through this platform with its networks, ensuring that the different stakeholders have a say, can be brought together and express themselves and then help develop the answers respectively. It sounds like that requires an attitude shift from donors. We need to maybe develop a more humble approach, which of course is a huge challenge also to explain to our constituency because they want to see — I’m not even sure they want to see the results, they want to see the flag, they want to be able to say “OK, we did that, we were there and we were visible and therefore we can be congratulated for it.” As soon as you move more towards the multistakeholder approach, you get into [the] challenge of contribution. What is it we really contributed to? I think that’s our task, to overcome that challenge. What I find very interesting is those who are extremely interested here in Switzerland in the 2030 agenda are coming from the private sector. Somehow this framework speaks to the private sector and the private sector is very much under pressure to do business in a different way. So I think especially on the nutrition agenda the private sector is interested, but they realize the pressure’s going to mount on them so they push for some changes also. How can donors work with the private sector to encourage more domestic resource mobilization when it comes to nutrition? When the governments see and feel that their own private sector wants a stronger engagement and more resources, I think that then donors can help in supporting the creation of a safe space, helping to enhance the capacities — when we talk about SUN concretely — of the national focal points, giving it enough political weight and engaging also senior officials on [the] donor side to exchange with senior officials on [the] partner government side. There are interventions at different levels that then mount somehow the intention of the respective government. It makes sense to invest into that business in nutrition. It’s when you use such a safe space to bring partners to the table which normally do not speak to each other that already can result in interesting results you would never expect. I think that’s the main role, in really supporting, going along with the different partners, but not being the one who leads. That’s not our role.