The African Union praises the African Development Bank’s (ADB) African Leaders for Nutrition and declares 2022 the “Year of Nutrition of the African Union”.
The African Leaders for nutrition initiative, under the aegis of the African Development Bank (AfDB), was recognized last Sunday in Addis Ababa by the African Union (Au) for the progress made in promoting investments for nutrition, continent-wide.
At the end of its 35th ordinary session, the AU, through a short decision, congratulated this initiative, which made it possible to support nutrition advocacy as part of efforts to ensure that Member States devote adequate financial resources to nutrition interventions.
The “African Leaders for Nutrition” initiative is a high-level political engagement platform to advance the nutrition issue in Africa. It is headed by (former) heads of state, finance ministers and eminent personalities.
The AU session declared 2022 the “Year of Nutrition of the African Union”. The President of the AfDB Group, Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina, stressed the importance of advancing the nutrition issue.
According to Beth Dunford, Vice-president of the Bank in charge of Agriculture and human and social development, “the recognition of the efforts of African Leaders for nutrition comes at a time when this initiative capitalizes on the visibility that the declaration of the Year of Nutrition of the African Union brings to the fight to eradicate malnutrition and increase food security in Africa”.
African Nutrition Leaders are pursuing three goals for the Year of Nutrition. The aim is to ensure the necessary investments for the implementation of a nutrition action plan that will reduce malnutrition across the continent, identify cost-effective interventions that deserve to be implemented and promote accountability, as the Au member States strive to achieve the Goals of the World Health Assembly and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in nutrition.
The AU Year of Nutrition revolves around the theme of Strengthening the continent’s nutritional resilience and food security.
It aims to strengthen fundamental systems such as agri-food, health and social protection systems and to accelerate the development of human, social and economic capital in Africa.
The African Leaders for Nutrition will help the AU Commission and the Government of Côte d’Ivoire to bring together the “nutrition champions” members of the initiative, in order to design strategies to ensure the proper implementation of the declaration. The initiative will also support the AU Commission in its advocacy to African leaders to increase investments in carefully targeted interventions and in monitoring progress made.
The initiative also plans to organize high-level consultative meetings with stakeholders from African countries, dedicated to mobilizing additional resources to invest in nutrition. It is also expected that African Nutrition Leaders will validate a mid-term review that will quantify the progress made in the implementation of the AU Declaration of the Year of Nutrition.
“The promotion of nutrition is part of the Bank’s feeding Africa strategy, which is deployed through a number of the Bank’s programmes, such as our flagship programme ‘Technologiesfor the transformation of African agriculture’, which provides climate-friendly technologies to millions of African smallholder farmers, helping them to produce more and more nutritious food,” said Dr Martin Fregene, AfDB Director for Agriculture and Agro-industry.
Some 61.4 million children under the age of 5 are stunted in Africa, of whom 12.1 million suffer from cachexia and 10.6 million are overweight.
The AU Year of Nutrition runs from February 2022 until the organisation’s next regular session.
