Solving malnutrition: Public money for public problems

The global community must all get involved with tackling malnutrition, but those who pin their hopes on the private sector will have their expectations “tremendously dashed in the future,” Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, told Devex at the #FutureFortified Global Summit in Arusha, Tanzania.

“Everybody talks about how the private sector is going to contribute the billions to all these great things — not just nutrition — that we want to see happen,” he said. “Of course they’re not going to do that — they’re in the business of mostly making money.”

While it’s important to secure the involvement of the private sector, Lomborg asserted that public money must be spent to solve a public problem like malnutrition.