UNICEF, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are partnering to galvanize domestic investment in treating malnutrition with ready-to-eat-therapeutic foods through Nutrition Match Fund.
The fund was established in early 2021 with seed contributions including from the U.K. government, and the organizations involved say the early results are positive. It seeks to diversify and scale up investment in malnutrition treatment at a time when even more children are going hungry: UNICEF projects an additional 9 million children worldwide will suffer from wasting because of the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, conflict, and ongoing inequality. Forty-five million children are already wasted — the most severe form of malnutrition.
The global fund aims to incentivize governments to spend money on malnutrition treatment by providing a one-to-one funding match. Participating countries will receive twice the amount of nutrition commodities they’ve paid for themselves. In order to take advantage of the match, governments must specifically mention the fund in their national budgets.
So far, four countries — Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda — have taken advantage of the matching fund by leveraging nearly $4 million total in domestic resources.
“If they give us $100 to procure RUTFs, we’ll give them $200 worth of RUTFs. That’s where the match occurs, in our procurement process.”
— Saul Guerrero, senior adviser for emergency nutrition, UNICEFSaul Guerrero, senior adviser for emergency nutrition at UNICEF, said that the fact that funding for malnutrition treatment typically comes from humanitarian budgets can mean countries don’t always prioritize it.
“It tends to be humanitarian contexts that tend to have easier access to these funds, even if it's a problem that doesn’t primarily occur in humanitarian contexts. And so there’s this discrepancy between the type of funding that is available versus the type of contexts that need it most,” Guerrero said.
“The second implication of that financing reality is that humanitarian funding tends to be short-term in nature, meaning 12 months, 18 months, 24 months,” he continued. “That makes planning much harder for some of these services at country level. The rationale is to diversify the funding sources for these products by trying to incentivize greater allocation of domestic resources towards these commodities.”
While the Nutrition Match Fund was originally sent up at the beginning of 2021, it took UNICEF most of the year to engage with governments and let them know the opportunity to leverage their money for wasting treatment commodities such as RUTFs was available, Guerrero said. Representatives in UNICEF’s 120 global country offices are telling governments about the fund during their regular communications.
Guerrero said the funders of the Nutrition Match Fund were initially cautious about spreading the word too quickly and raising expectations beyond what they could meet. But as other donors joined the effort, UNICEF began speaking more publicly about it late last year.
Corina Campian, manager of CIFF’s evidence, measurement, and evaluation team, said conversations remain ongoing with potential additional donors. The foundation intends to invest in the fund for the next four years at least, she said. CIFF, along with UNICEF, contributed $50 million each, while the Gates Foundation committed $10 million.
“The fund itself is open to any country that is ready to commit,” Campian said. “The most important criteria: firstly, high rates of prevalence and then government commitment.”
To receive benefits from the fund, countries write a letter to UNICEF stating their request for a certain amount of money they’d like to leverage. Guerrero said that assuming the requested amount is available — it has been so far — the government then transfers their contribution to UNICEF for its procurement of RUTFs, the high-calorie substance packed with nutrients used to treat severe acute malnutrition.
“We then, instead of delivering just the amount that they gave us in terms of commodities, we deliver twice as much,” Guerrero said. “If they give us $100 to procure RUTFs, we’ll give them $200 worth of RUTFs. That’s where the match occurs, in our procurement process.”
Operating the fund this way allows UNICEF to ensure governments have doled out the promised spending. Because UNICEF is being paid directly for the commodities, the agency doesn’t need any extra steps to verify money is being spent on malnutrition treatment as a government has laid out in its national plan.
“Our hope is that it will not be a one-off situation. Our hope is that these investments will continue to be made for as long as these countries have children that need treatment,” Guerrero said. “My understanding is in every one of the four countries where we have already leveraged these commitments, we are already starting conversations about the next funding cycle. Because yes, our intention is to try to maintain and sustain this investment and our match year on year. Only time will tell on what it takes to successfully achieve that.”
The fund doesn’t have a set timeline, Guerrero said, and UNICEF intends to operate it as long as there is enough money, and need remains. And while it remains focused on RUTFs for the moment, he said UNICEF is already thinking about how a similar mechanism could be advantageous for other nutrition commodities.
CIFF said it will be looking to amplify success stories of countries that have committed domestic resources to malnutrition treatment, leveraged money from the fund, and seen a decrease in prevalence of wasting.
“We’re in a changing landscape … Funding priorities shift all the time. But at the same time we have this sense that we are running out of time on wasting because the World Health Assembly targets [are] to reduce global wasting to less than 5% and that’s by the end of 2025. That’s three years away,” Campian said. “There’s a lot of momentum behind the wasting agenda. Now I think we need to follow that momentum with more action. And that action for donors means allocating resources towards this.”
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