We provide technical and financial assistance to nine governments for their vitamin A supplementation (VAS) programs to ensure children receive twice-yearly VAS – a proven, low-cost intervention. We also provide the full vitamin A capsule supply to more than 55 countries each year. Collectively in 2019, we reached more than 160 million children across 61 countries with two doses of vitamin A. Since 1998, in partnership with UNICEF, we have supplied more than 10 billion capsules globally, which has helped save the lives of five million children.

Working with manufacturers, governments and partners on the ground, we provide as much as 75% of the world’s vitamin A capsules. In addition, Nutrition International has hosted and chaired the Global Alliance for Vitamin A (GAVA) for more than a decade, bringing together organizations, policy makers and program implementers to share information and develop policies and tools to improve VAS delivery globally.

Adding micronutrients to common staple foods can significantly improve the nutritional quality of the food supply and improve public health with minimal risk.

That is why food fortification has been identified by the World Health Organization, the Copenhagen Consensus and the Food and Agriculture Organization as one of the top four strategies for decreasing micronutrient malnutrition at the global level.

By working with the private sector and existing government platforms that reach large segments of the population, this year Nutrition International’s programs helped more than 230 million people gain access to fortified food, contributing to healthier diets.

For example, in 1995, Nutrition International, working with partners at the University of Toronto, helped create double fortified salt (DFS): salt fortified with both iodine and iron. Further studies were conducted over the following two decades until we were able to bring this intervention to scale through our Canada-funded Right Start program.

As a result of this innovation, in 2019, more than 11 million people, including 2.8 million additional women of reproductive age, benefitted from DFS provided through the Social Safety Net Program in Madhya Pradesh, India. In the Indian state of Gujarat, nearly 1.5 million adolescent girls and pregnant and lactating women were provided with DFS as a take-home ration, and a further 1.4 million children benefited from it in cooked meals.

After the first thousand days from conception, adolescence is the biggest period of childhood growth. Too often overlooked in programming, adolescents – particularly girls entering puberty – have unique and specific nutritional needs. Our adolescent nutrition program is active in seven countries.

In 2019 we helped avert an estimated 640,000 cases of anaemia, a direct contribution to the globally agreed-upon target set by the World Health Assembly to reduce anaemia by 50% in women of reproductive age by 2025.

This target is off track, in part because adolescents – particularly adolescent girls – have no global champion.

They are often missed by child survival interventions, and programs directed at women of reproductive age do not account for their unique nutritional needs.

This lack of focus is particularly deadly for the 16 million adolescents who give birth annually – two million before the age of 15. Every year, 70,000 die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth, including anaemia, making pregnancy the leading cause of death for 15- to 19-year-old girls globally.

We helped build the capacity of teachers and other stakeholders to deliver tailored adolescent nutrition programs. Overall, we trained more than 95,000 frontline workers in the health and education sectors to deliver and support the implementation of in- and out-of-school adolescent nutrition programs.

Through our Nutrition Technical Assistance Mechanism (NTEAM), Nutrition International shares expertise globally to lead and support the scale-up of nutrition for the most vulnerable. NTEAM provides technical assistance to governments and global organizations, helping them build capacity to design and deliver high-impact nutrition programs, ensuring technical oversight and quality assurance to the development of both products and services.

Through NTEAM’s Technical Assistance for Nutrition (TAN) project, funded with UK aid from the UK government, Nutrition International provides coordinated technical assistance to help Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) countries, the SUN Movement Secretariat and regional coordination bodies overcome gaps in capacity, design and delivery of multi-sectoral national nutrition action plans. We also work to enhance the quality, scale, and effectiveness of nutrition-related programs and policies, ensuring gender equality is meaningfully considered throughout.

NTEAM is proud to have enabled the operationalization of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Multi-sectoral Nutrition Action Plan and its goal of mainstreaming nutrition into its investment portfolios across the health, agriculture, WASH and social protection sectors. Through NTEAM, Nutrition International will continue to provide technical assistance to the AfDB thanks to the generous support of the Banking on Nutrition Partnership, funded by Big Win Philanthropy and the Aliko Dangote Foundation.

Building on this national plan, and working with partners, in 2019 we helped translate those national priorities to the local context in four counties, creating County Nutrition Action Plans (CNAPs).

The CNAPs identify nutrition activities across multiple sectors, as well as their outputs and costs. Nutrition International then worked with counties to prioritize activities that focused on results and systems building, with the goal of strengthening their capacity to plan, manage and sustain these programs.

These counties then committed to increasing the domestic resources allocated to those activities which, once disbursed, Nutrition International would match with Global Affairs Canada funding. Key to these agreements was that funding could not be drawn from other social sectors and had to be a net increase over existing allocations.

This culminated in signed funding agreements with the Kenyan counties of Busia, Makueni, Nandi and Vihiga. Combined, this initiative leveraged CAD $2M in domestic nutrition investment through 2023 – $1.6M of which is additional funding that will be matched by Nutrition International. This is a five-fold increase in domestic funding for high-impact, low-cost nutrition actions that work.

Too often, pregnant women don’t have contact with the healthcare system early enough in their pregnancy to benefit from quality antenatal care that includes, for example, receiving the full recommended course of iron folic acid (IFA) supplements. That is why we were proud to ensure an additional 1.9 million pregnant women received their full course of IFA through our maternal nutrition program, reducing cases of anaemia and helping avoid complications for both mother and child during pregnancy and delivery.

Countries report that our ongoing support to strengthen the IFA supplement supply chain has resulted in a more reliable and sustained supply. We have also worked to improve practices and build stronger enabling environments for supportive, personalized and quality care during pregnancy. The strengthened capacity and supportive supervision of frontline health workers drives greater program outputs. For example, 2019 also saw improvements in routine data collection tools and tracking of indicators to better monitor and ensure women are receiving IFA.