Advocacy for the inclusion of adolescent nutrition in Nutrition for Growth, Paris 2025

The Global Adolescent Nutrition Network is a network of researchers, academics, programmers, government representatives, donors, and United Nations agencies, coordinated by the Emergency Nutrition Network. The Global Adolescent Nutrition Network’s mission is to increase global attention to the issue of adolescent nutrition, which is often overlooked in research, policy, and practice. They do this by sharing resources and experiences, fostering collaboration, and increasing the representation of young people in decision-making and co-creation of research.

This advocacy brief calls on governments and donors to prioritise the future of all adolescents by making pledges specific to this age group (10-19 years) at the Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit, to be held in Paris in March 2025. N4G is a global pledging moment which seeks to drive greater action towards ending malnutrition. The Global Adolescent Nutrition Network sees this as a critical opportunity to spotlight adolescent nutrition.

The brief provides key information for writing effective pledges to improve adolescent nutrition. It calls on youth advocates, civil society groups, researchers, and other supporters to take this information to those writing pledges ahead of N4G Paris 2025.

Specifically, the document has six key asks. The first is making commitments relating to adolescent nutrition (boys and girls). The brief outlines what good N4G commitments should look like for adolescents and highlights the lack of commitments made at N4G Tokyo 2021 (only 6% of new commitments related to adolescent nutrition). The second ask is funding to improve adolescent nutrition services, monitoring, and evidence generation, including implementation research to inform the delivery of effective adolescent nutrition interventions. The third ask is strong policy and regulation to create enabling environments for adolescent nutrition, free from commercial conflicts of interest, and seeking input from adolescents into national nutrition plans. The fourth ask is targets for reducing adolescent anaemia, underweight, and overweight/obesity, and improving adolescent diets, including national and global targets. The fifth ask is for indicators of adolescent nutrition to be included in national data systems, to monitor progress and measure the impact of services and interventions (with key indicators disaggregated by age and sex). The sixth ask is making data for decision-making available to all stakeholders, to understand the nutritional needs of adolescents and to drive gender-responsive actions (with a focus on data quality).

Going beyond these requests, the brief outlines the Global Adolescent Nutrition Network’s vision of what each of the N4G Thematic Working Groups can do to prioritise adolescent nutrition.

The brief concludes with a case study from Senegal, which made several adolescent-specific nutrition commitments at N4G Tokyo 2021. The Government of Senegal has subsequently integrated adolescent nutrition into its Multisectoral Nutrition Strategic Plan (2024-2028) and implemented a school-based adolescent nutrition programme, with technical and financial support from Nutrition International. It has developed a new indicator to track progress towards increasing the coverage of adolescent nutrition interventions. The Government of Senegal has ambitious plans to reach over 150,000 urban adolescents with multisectoral programmes to reduce malnutrition in all its forms.