This event is co-organized with Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU); UN-Nutrition Secretariat; African Union Commission; Northwestern University, USA; WASAG; Government of Ethiopia; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Institute for Development Studies; Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy; CGIAR Initiative on NEXUS Gains.

In 2019, the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition, which has now evolved into UN-Nutrition, organized an event in New York to discuss how nutrition was linked to various Sustainable Development Goals that were being reviewed that year. This included a meeting on linkages between nutrition and SDG 6 on water and sanitation. Out of the meeting, a working group was formed that put together a discussion paper on Water and Nutrition. Harmonizing Actions for the United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition and the United Nations Water Action Decade.

This session will review progress on the harmonization between the Decade of Action on Nutrition and the United Nations Water Action Decade since 2019, and will identify priority actions to strengthen outcomes from progress in the Water Decade for nutrition and from progress in the Nutrition Decade for SDG 6. The session will focus on Africa and will be linked to the African Union Year on Nutrition. Areas of attention include progress on three recommendations from the paper: 1) Implement nutrition sensitive water management; 2) Ensure the environmental sustainability of diets; and 3) Address social inequities in water–nutrition linkages.

The session will also draw on the Committee on World Food Security report on Water for Food Security and Nutrition, the first comprehensive effort to bring water, food and nutrition security issues together and bring together key authors from that effort to review efforts made to date and additional interventions needed.