Which Aid Spending Categories Have the Greatest Untapped Potential to Support the Reduction of Undernutrition? Some Ideas on Moving Forward

The financial resource needs for the reduction of under-nutrition are significant, while the returns from reducing undernutrition are large. Yet the share of public resources allocated to the reduction of undernutrition remains disproportionately small. For overseas development assistance, the investment in nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive categories amounts to less than 3% of the total. What is the potential for other categories of public resource investments to reduce undernutrition, and in which sectors are these investments to be found? This paper proposes a framework for addressing this question and ventures some suggestions as to which of the categories of overseas development assistance beyond the well-known “nutrition-specific” and “nutrition-sensitive” categories are most likely to yield improvements in nutrition status if they could be redesigned with this in mind. We conclude that policy makers should look widely within the underlying and basic determinant intervention space for investments that, when changed at the margins, could result in significant improvements in nutrition.