This piece was originally published by CNBC Africa on September 9.

For nearly a decade, I have served as the African Union’s Nutrition Champion. In that time I have visited clinics, schools and villages across our continent, and I have learned that the truest measure of any nation is not found in its GDP tables or its infrastructure. It is found in the bodies and minds of its youngest children. A child who is well nourished in the first thousand days of life carries that advantage forever. A child who is not carries the loss forever, and so does the nation.

I write now because the world has changed, and Africa must change faster.

The era of predictable development assistance is over. The recent and unprecedented cuts to official development assistance were not a pause; they were a signal. Old systems of order and alliance are facing upheaval and deconstruction, and we must be honest about what this means: children will suffer and malnutrition will worsen unless someone steps forward. The question of our time is simple. When donors step back, who must step forward?

The answer is that we must. African leaders, African governments, African institutions.

Across our continent, that answer is already taking shape. President Mahama’s Accra Reset has turned sovereignty from an aspiration into a working doctrine, insisting that countries must have the practical capacity to finance their own core functions, regulate their own quality, produce their own medicines and govern their own data. In July, our Union gathered in Accra in Extraordinary Session and committed to ending preventable maternal and child deaths. The direction is set. Africa will be the author of its own health and its own future.

But I must speak plainly about a foundation that is still missing from this new house we are building. There is no health sovereignty, no economic sovereignty, and finally no sovereignty of any kind, in a nation whose children’s immune systems and brain development depend on the shifting priorities of a distant donor. Africa’s population will roughly double by 2050. That is more than one billion more children. Whether they live past their fifth birthday, whether they learn, whether they build, will be decided by whether they are nourished. If that decision rests in foreign hands, it is hard to imagine sovereignty at all.

We speak often, and rightly, of food sovereignty. But food sovereignty only makes sense when it delivers nutrition sovereignty. A field of grain is not the same as a nourished child.

What do I mean by child survival and nutrition sovereignty? I mean that the nutrition of our children becomes a top priority of our own governments, financed increasingly from our own budgets, with presidents and prime ministers who know the percentage of children in their countries who are stunted and wasted, and who treat those numbers as they treat inflation or debt. I mean the two-cent capsule of vitamin A that cuts child deaths from common illnesses, delivered by our systems, on our schedule. I mean fortifying the staple foods our people eat every day through our own industries and our own laws. I mean preventing wasting in the first place, so that fewer of our children must be rescued by therapeutic products shipped from overseas. I mean confronting the quiet tragedy of babies born too small or too soon because their mothers and the adolescent girls who will become mothers were not themselves well nourished. I mean bringing immunization and nutrition together in one visit, one system, one plan, so that no opportunity is missed, newborn deaths fall, and every child, from the beginning, is fully protected and ready to learn.

This is not a plea for isolation, and it is not a rejection of partnership. It is the opposite. When countries choose what is best for their people, they have agency; when they have agency, they have ownership of the solutions; and partners who align behind that ownership multiply its power. In my own Kingdom of Lesotho, and in many nations across Africa, we have seen what this looks like: costed national nutrition plans that put the best investments first, fortification written into law, child health days that combine vaccines with vitamin A so that no opportunity is missed. Long-standing partners such as Canada, and organizations like Nutrition International, have shown that external support can serve sovereignty rather than substitute for it. That is the model for the era ahead.

The prize is enormous. Well-nourished children become well-educated adults; well-educated adults are productive, earn more, pay more tax and strengthen the very treasuries that fund the next generation’s nutrition. This virtuous cycle is the most reliable path any nation has ever found from dependency to independence. Nutrition is the difference between a child going to school and excelling there. It is the difference between an economy stuck in a rut and one driven forward by the strength and potential of its next generation.

So we will act, in sequence and with purpose.

This September in New York, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, I will convene fellow heads of state and government, ministers and partners around a Call to Action for child survival and nutrition, under a simple banner: our children cannot wait. From there I will carry this cause onward: to Doha in December, where the world’s partners in development gather, and then home to our own Union in Addis Ababa in the new year. At every step my message will be the same. Political commitment must become investment, and investment must become African-led delivery, an African agenda, led by Africans, measured by African results.

In this turbulent new world order, many fear that the moral compass of the international community has been misplaced. I do not believe it is gone. I believe it is waiting to be found, dusted off, and followed again, and that causes like this one are how nations of goodwill rediscover it together, across old divides, on values every culture and every faith already share. There is no truer north on which to align than the survival of a child.

Hope and vision are critical resources in triggering action, and we are not powerless. In the story we now begin to write, countries are the authors of their own destiny, and leaders define their worth and success by the health and nutrition of their children. I invite my fellow leaders, in Africa and beyond, to join us. Our children cannot wait. Let us make certain they do not have to.

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