Philomena Irene, Nutrition Specialist at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Bauchi Field Office announced that the not-for-profit organisation requires an annual budget of $3.4 billion to support 350 million children and women until 2030.
Irene disclosed this during a presentation at a two-day media dialogue on age-appropriate complementary feeding, organized by UNICEF’s Bauchi Field Office in Gombe. The Media Dialogue hosted Journalists working in Adamawa, Bauchi, Gombe, Taraba and Plateau States.
The Nutrition Specialist explained that the initiative would be run through its financial initiative, the Child Nutrition Fund (CNF) program which aimed at enhancing global and national governance for the early prevention, detection, and treatment of child wasting in 23 countries.
According to Irene, the fund focuses on scaling up five essential actions for the early treatment of child wasting: weight gain monitoring, nutrition counselling, micronutrient supplementation, deworming, and malaria control for women, particularly during pregnancy.
“It also supports exclusive and continued breastfeeding for the first two years of life, as well as the provision of adequate complementary foods with micronutrient supplements,” Irene noted.
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Additionally, the fund provides food supplements for young children under five and for pregnant and breastfeeding women, and it promotes early detection of child wasting and treatment with ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF).
She further explained that CNF utilizes three windows to increase the allocation of global and domestic resources: the Program Window, the Match Window, and the Supplier Window.
The Program Window identifies investment needs, develops robust investment propositions, tracks global allocations, monitors the effectiveness of these allocations, and identifies key investment gaps, advocating for a reprioritization of partner contributions.
Irene highlighted that the CNF has already allocated over $25 million to Kenya, Malawi, Pakistan, and the Philippines, and has established high-value partnerships, including a $30 million project with Gavi in Ethiopia.
The Match Window acts as a catalytic matching mechanism for services and supplies for the prevention, detection, and treatment of child wasting. Through this window, over $15 million in domestic funding for essential supplies has been matched in more than a dozen countries, including Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia, Guinea Conakry, and Namibia.
The organisation’s Supplier Window offers various financing tools to help nutrition supply producers deliver commodities promptly, including pre-financing tools to boost supply volumes and financial options to facilitate access to loans from local financial institutions.
UNICEF emphasizes that investing in nutrition is one of the smartest investments states can make to break the cycle of poverty, address inequality, and enhance productivity later in life. “Currently, millions of young children are not reaching their full potential due to inadequate nutrition.
“Governments should seize the opportunity provided by the Matched Nutrition Fund to improve the health and nutrition of children aged 6 to 23 months in their states.”
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