LONDON, 14 October, 2017: RESULTS UK welcomes DFID’s new position paper on nutrition ‘Saving lives, investing in future generations, and building prosperity’. Launched by the Secretary of State for International Development, Priti Patel, at the World Bank’s Human Capital Summit on Friday, the paper sets out the UK’s policy priorities to accelerate global efforts on malnutrition, and will guide its nutrition related investments until 2020.

In response, Aaron Oxley, Executive Director at RESULTS said:

“It is encouraging to see such strong positioning of women and girls at the core of DFID’s nutrition efforts in this paper, along with a focus on addressing all forms of undernutrition in young children. This life-cycle approach to nutrition will unlock potential in millions of women and girls living in some of the poorest parts of the world”.

We laud DFID’s continued commitment to the ‘leave no-one behind’ agenda. While the paper mainly mentions this in relation to fragile and conflict-affected regions, we call on them to also scale-up their efforts in non-fragile contexts suffering from a huge burden of the problem. This includes many middle-income countries where malnutrition is a silent and everyday emergency.

The UK has been vital to growing global efforts for nutrition since the 2013 Nutrition for Growth summit. We welcome the UK leveraging its role in the global architecture for nutrition by working with a wide range of stakeholders, including the Scaling up Nutrition movement.

The position paper correctly highlights that although nutrition is now slowly rising up the global agenda, current efforts are still far from enough to meet the global targets. Now the paper has been released, we look forward to working with the UK government to implement its policy priorities

For further information, please contact Tom Maguire on [email protected] or on 02077933970.

RESULTS UK is a movement of passionate, committed, everyday people who together use their voices to influence political decisions that will bring an end to poverty. For more information please visit www.results.org.uk.