The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), under its Child Nutrition Fund (CNF) ambition, has declared that it is committed to reaching at least 350 million children and women every year by 2030.
To achieve this, the Child Nutrition Fund estimates a financing need of US$3.4 billion per year, stressing that change takes time, but it’s driven by ambition.
The disclosure was made by a UNICEF Nutrition Specialist, Josephine Irene, in a paper She presented during a 2-day Media Dialogue on age-appropriate complementary feeding, organised by UNICEF Bauchi Field Office for
Explaining what the Child Nutrition Fund (CNF) is, the Nutrition Specialist explained that it is a new financing mechanism designed to strengthen global and national governance for the early prevention, detection and treatment of child wasting.
On where CNF works, She disclosed that, “We support government-led efforts in 23 countries with the highest number of children with wasting.
The CNF also supports the scale-up of five essential actions for the early treatment of child wasting, which includes: Weight gain monitoring, nutrition counselling, micronutrients, supplements, deworming, and malaria control for women, particularly during pregnancy.
It also gives support for exclusive and continued breastfeeding in the first two years of life, as well as adequate complementary foods with micronutrient supplements.
The CNF also supports food supplements for young children under 5 and for women, particularly those who are pregnant and breastfeeding, as well as early detection of child wasting and
treatment with ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF).
On how CNF works, She said that “We use three windows to increase the allocation of global and domestic resources to programmemes and supplies through the programme window, Match Window and supplier window.”
The programme Window: Identifies investment needs, Develops robust investment propositions, Track global allocations against needs, Monitors the effectiveness of allocations, identifies key investment gaps and advocates for a reprioritization of partner contributions.
Under the CNF, over $25 million has been allocated to Kenya, Malawi, Pakistan and the Philippines, while High-value partnerships has been established, including a $30 million project with Gavi in Ethiopia.
The Match Window Is a catalytic matching mechanism for services and supplies for the prevention, detection and treatment of child wasting.
Through the Child Nutrition Fund matching window, over US$15 million in domestic funding for essential supplies has been matched in over a dozen countries, including Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia, Guinea-Conakry, and Namibia.
Supplier Window offers a range of financing tools to support the producers of nutrition supplies in delivering commodities in a timely manner.
This includes prefinancing tools to help producers increase the volume of supplies and financial options to facilitate access to loans from local financial institutions.
The RUTF Advance Payment Facility provides advance payments to eligible RUTF suppliers. To date, the facility has financed $89 million in advance payments to RUTF suppliers.
This has made more than 4.8 million cartons of RUTF available to children in need much faster than would have otherwise been possible.
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