My name is Ambarka Youssoufane and, as ENN’s Regional Knowledge Management Specialist for West and Central Africa, I often visit countries in the sub-region to talk with various stakeholders in nutrition and the SUN Movement. This was the context in which I visited Chad from 23-28 January, and witnessed strong dynamic activity around the SUN Focal Point, within the framework of the multi-stakeholder platform for the multi-sectoral coordination of nutrition intervention in this country. It is this platform that I would like to talk about today.

Firstly, for those wishing to know more about Chad, it is a Central African country in the north of Central Africa, to the south of Libya. Completely landlocked, Chad also borders Niger and Nigeria, and Sudan in the west. Chad is a fragile country surrounded by fragile states, some of which are also affected by conflict.  The country has a population of around 14 million inhabitants across a surface area of 1,284,000 km². It is divided into a desert area in the north, a semi-arid area in the centre and a Sudanese area in the south. Chad is ranked 184th/187 by the UNDP’s 2013 Human Development Report, with a poverty level of 47.5%.

Chad also has a high level of malnutrition, with a Global Acute Malnutrition level of 11.7% and a chronic malnutrition level of 29%, according to the SMART 2015 nutrition survey. It was, therefore, to address this very serious nutritional situation that Chad joined the SUN Movement in 2013. Joining the SUN Movement was a turning point in the approach to fighting malnutrition.
Since joining the SUN Movement, Chad has implemented a number of reforms to bring itself in line with the SUN Movement’s recommendations, and to establish a suitable, efficient framework for achieving its objectives in the fight against malnutrition. And so, by order of the Prime Minister, a three-level framework for coordination was put in place:

• Central government: the National Nutrition Council, meeting once a year. This is chaired by the President of the Republic and determines the direction of policy on nutrition and food.
• Ministry of Public Health: The Permanent Technical Committee on Food and Nutrition (CTPNA), the SUN Movement’s multi-stakeholder platform, chaired by the Director of the National Centre for Nutrition and Food Technology (CNNTA).
• On a regional level: the Regional Action Committees (CRA) is chaired by the regional governors and brings together all the decentralized technical services related to nutrition across the state.

Chad is, therefore, one of the few countries to have put a multi-stakeholder platform in place by ministerial decree. It must also be noted that this platform is comprehensive in terms of its composition, but also highly efficient. In fact, since the country joined the Movement and the government’s SUN Focal Point was designated, it has proceeded to set up other networks, which make up the structure of a mechanism for coordinating multiple stakeholders, particularly the donor network, scientists' network, business network, United Nations Network and Civil Society Network. In addition to the networks officially provided by the SUN Movement, Chad has also established a network of parliamentarians for nutrition, champions and journalists.

All these networks get together for the monthly multi-stakeholder platform meeting, chaired by the National Director for Nutrition, to discuss nutrition-related activities in the broad sense, i.e. nutrition-specific as well as nutrition-sensitive activities. The platform provides a framework for dialogue and exchange between stakeholders on a national level, with the objective of making interventions in the area of nutrition more coherent. It uses a global action plan, which is a synthesis of the different individual plans of its constituent networks. For some time now, and this is a real achievement, it has taken steps towards decentralizing multi-stakeholder platform in the regions.  Five out of the country’s 23 regions have benefited from the official establishment of a Regional Action Committee (regional multi-stakeholder platform), made up of different technical services decentralized from the state. According to the SUN Focal Point, this first step is the trial run before coordination frameworks are set up in other regions.

Another significant challenge for Chad is the efficiency of the National Food and Nutrition Council (CNNA), which has yet to meet since being set up. The European Union and the United Nations Network (UN-REACH) have scheduled in their plans of action for 2017 to support the SUN Focal Point in reinvigorating the CNNA so that it can regularly organise its two annual meetings. Other equally significant challenges seriously impede the ability to work across multiple sectors and fight malnutrition in Chad. Particular challenges are poor domestic funding for nutrition, over-emphasis on emergency interventions and weak inter-platform coordination. Indeed, the multi-stakeholder platform and the nutrition cluster may well be perfectly synchronized, but this is not the case for the food security platform or the WASH cluster. For example, the multi-stakeholder platforms for nutrition and food security organised their January meetings on the same day and at the same time, making inter-platform coordination very difficult.

Since joining the SUN Movement, Chad has set up a multi-sectoral coordination framework for nutrition, with the efficient participation of all the sectoral networks within the SUN Movement (civil society, United Nations, scientific, business, donor, parliamentarians, journalists, nutrition champions) around the SUN Focal Point. Many strategy documents have also been developed, including: the national policy for food and nutrition, the inter-sectoral action plan etc.

In this way, Chad has managed to set up one of the SUN Movement’s most comprehensive structures, providing itself with policy documents to define its vision and clear objectives. This whole system is run by very motivated stakeholders, operating within the multi-stakeholder platform, which meets monthly.

The conditions of good multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral coordination for nutrition intervention have been met in Chad. We just have to hope that the means for implementing the inter-sectoral nutrition strategy will be available, and that this system will operate successfully. Good luck to all our friends in Chad.