“After decades of hiatus, the global community and, most importantly, high-burden countries are stepping up to the challenge of malnutrition.” So said Shawn K. Baker, director of nutrition for the Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program, at last week’s 23rd Annual Martin J. Forman Lecture, held at IFPRI. In his talk, “Stepping into the SUN: Successes and Constraints from On the Ground,” Baker said 2013 has been a pivotal year for nutrition, with the Nutrition for Growth Summit in London and the release of the most recent Lancet Nutrition series outlining the latest research findings around maternal and childhood malnutrition. Moreover, recent announcements indicate that 41 countries (and 1 state in India) have pledged their participation in the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement.

Despite outward signs of progress in the form of increased political commitments, Baker highlighted a key statistic from the Lancet Nutrition series—namely, that an estimated 3.1 million children under the age of five die every year from undernutriton. “[This is] one of the great moral failures of our time,” he said, adding that it is imperative to not only treat malnourished children, but to prevent them from becoming malnourished in the first place. To accomplish this, Baker said it was essential to ramp up the implementation process and translate research into action, adding that it took more than a decade to translate research into the 1,000 Days Partnership. Baker identified six major constraints that must be addressed in order to realize the promise of scaling up nutrition:

1. Build capacity. Agricultural policy research and human resource development—through educational campaigns about basic nutrition, breastfeeding, vitamin supplements, and biofortified crops—must become a core part of the nutrition movement in order to achieve sustained success on the ground.
2. Translate political commitment into action. Government leaders must follow through on political commitments to scale up nutrition and end hunger and malnutrition by closing funding gaps for programs and targets such as the SUN Movement, the Millennium Development Goals, and the Zero Hunger Campaign.
3. Figure out the “science of how.” Researchers and policymakers understand which interventions work best at the micro (i.e., individual or household) level, but do not yet have a firm grasp of how to scale up these interventions at the community, regional, and country levels. Governments and the donor community must invest in research that goes beyond basic nutritional science and examines how nutrition interventions fare under country- and region-specific conditions.
4. Leverage more support from other development sectors. IFPRI and others have led efforts to link evidence bases across the agricultural and health sectors, but more work must be done to strengthen research-based linkages between nutrition and the agriculture, health, and education sectors, for example.
5. Measure change. Building a solid evidence base that is context specific will allow countries and partners to measure the return on investments made in the nutrition sector. Therefore, more data must be collected on the types of nutrition interventions that work, where they work, and under what conditions.
6. Sustain commitment to nutrition interventions. The issue of nutrition is currently experiencing a wave of political support at the global level. The international development community, working together with high-burden countries, must commit to sustained investment in interventions that can end hunger and malnutrition.