Nutrition for Growth Summit 2021
The Tokyo Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit was held in December 2021 under the leadership of the Government of Japan. It was the third global pledging moment, designed to drive greater action toward ending malnutrition and helping ensure everyone, everywhere can reach their full potential.
This summit came at a critical time, midway through the United Nations (UN) Decade of Action on Nutrition, with only five years remaining to achieve the World Health Assembly targets on maternal, infant and young child nutrition, and 10 years to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.
The N4G Summit marked the culmination of the N4G Year of Action on nutrition launched in December 2020 by the Governments of Canada and Bangladesh. Guided by the N4G vision and roadmap1, commitment-making was at the heart of the summit and over the course of the Year of Action governments, business, multilaterals, donors, and other development partners were encouraged to make data-driven financial, policy, programmatic, or impact commitments covering one or more of three focus areas:
- Health: Integrating nutrition into Universal Health Coverage
- Food: Transforming food systems, to promote safe, sustainable, and healthy diets (with important linkages to the UN Food Systems Summit held in July 2021).
- Resilience: Addressing malnutrition effectively in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.
The promotion of data-driven accountability and securing new investment and driving innovation in nutrition financing cut across the above core areas.
By the conclusion of the summit, 396 new nutrition commitments (programmatic, policy and financial) were pledged by a total of 181 stakeholders from 78 countries. Importantly, two countries with high burdens of malnutrition, Bangladesh and Indonesia, pledged to step up domestic programming and double down on policies to reduce malnutrition. Donor governments, bilateral and multilateral development partners, civil society and other organisations committed new nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive financing of over USD 27 billion to tackle malnutrition in all its forms.
Future accountability for all the N4G commitments lies in the newly launched Nutrition Accountability Framework managed by the Global Nutrition Report (GNR). This is designed to record the new commitments made, monitor their impact and sets out the requirements for SMART commitment formulation (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). Stakeholders are expected to report on their progress annually to the GNR.
As well as the pledging summit itself, a large number of side events were held on a wide range of topics including nutrition financing, data gaps and data systems, the Global Action Plan on Child wasting2 and food systems. This sharing of evidence and the highlighting of opportunities has paved the way for the next N4G summit, to be hosted by France in Paris in 2024, where it is hoped that tangible results can be observed from the robust commitments made in Tokyo.