Africa bears a significant portion of the global malnutrition burden: two out of every five stunted children in the world live in the continent, and it is the only region in the world where the number of stunted children is continuing to grow. One reason for this lack of progress has been missed opportunities for integrating nutrition into existing programmes and sector delivery platforms.

In 2016, the African Development Bank (AfDB) launched the Banking on Nutrition (BoN) Partnership — formed by the Bank, Aliko Dangote Foundation and Big Win Philanthropy — to leverage the AfDB’s influence and make an impact on nutrition in Africa. The initiative will facilitate integrating nutrition into the bank’s operations, with a vision to unlocking the human capital and economic potential of the continent by investing in “Africa’s grey matter infrastructure.” The BoN partnership supported the development and approval of the Bank’s Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Action Plan (MNAP 2018–2025), which defined its goal to support the African Union’s target of a 40% reduction in stunting by 2025 through investments in nutrition-smart projects across five key sector portfolios: agriculture, social protection, health, water and sanitation (WASH), and education. These sectors account for over 30% of government spending in Africa.

To realize this goal, the BoN Partnership will focus on achieving sectoral targets in the five key sectors for nutrition-smart investments by 2025. The partnership supports institutional strengthening for nutrition capacity development through expansion of the bank’s human resources and technical capacity for nutrition, and the development of guidance documents and toolkits to guide nutrition-smart project designs. It will also develop a resource mobilization strategy to unlock additional domestic, private and official development assistance (ODA) nutrition-smart investments in Africa by 2025 using the bank’s voice, influence and partnerships with public and private sector entities.

In 2019, Nutrition International was recruited by the BoN Partnership to provide technical assistance to support the AfDB’s MNAP over three distinct phases.

In Phases 1 and 2, our technical assistance laid the foundation for integrating nutrition into the AfDB’s processes and projects by developing technical and operational guidance for nutrition-smart programming across five key sectors. We also provided capacity development and direct support for nutrition-smart programming, including helping to equip AfDB project task managers with the necessary knowledge and skills to design, manage and track nutrition-smart investments as part of the AfDB’s project portfolio. These phases were completed in 2019 and 2022, respectively.

Our technical assistance for Phase 3, which began in 2024, will further accelerate the growth of those investments. It will do this by systematically identifying projects that have the potential to integrate nutrition, particularly in countries with high burdens of children stunting. It will also identify and examine successful examples of such integration to better understand them and identify best practices, and it will expand the nutrition-smart approach into both new sectors (such as education and resilience) and private sector operations.

Finally, we will support the AfDB in its efforts to monitor and report on the nutrition outcomes of its investments, such as the percentage of the bank’s portfolio that is nutrition-smart and/or nutrition specific in key sectors, the number of high burden countries with nutrition-smart Country Strategy Papers, the total value of the national budget committed to nutrition-smart intervention in African countries, the percentage of private sectors operations that are nutrition-smart and more. This information will allow us to go beyond the investment data to show the actual outputs and outcomes of these investments — driving more efficient, targeted investment in the future.