Technical Briefing Paper from the Wasting and Stunting Technical Interest Group

In 2014, ENN developed a technical briefing paper under the guidance of the Wasting and Stunting Technical Interest Group (WaSt TIG), exploring the relationship between child wasting and stunting. For decades, wasting and stunting have been approached as separate conditions, largely disconnected in advocacy, programming, policy and financing. This has had negative implications for how children receive nutrition interventions and services across the world: support is often provided by different stakeholders who offer different interventions, often in different contexts, to different age groups and with different timeframes. Seven years later, a systematic review of evidence generated since the briefing paper was undertaken, authored by Susan Thurstans and colleagues from the WaSt TIG, and published in 2021 in the journal Maternal and Child Nutrition. This technical brief outlines some of the key findings within the systematic review. It provides an opportunity to update the original briefing paper by bringing all the evidence together and considering the programmatic and policy implications in a new technical brief.