Combating Malnutrition: Time to Act

by World Bank Group (Editor), Stuart Gillespie, M. McLachlan (Editor)

The paper illustrates the constraints that have limited action towards improving nutrition in the developing world. The understanding of how to best promote the needed changes in policies, programs, and institutional capacities has grown over the past decade, but remains limited. The international community has systemized its knowledge of what actions are likely to improve nutrition, but less effort to systemizing its knowledge of how to intervene in the sociopolitical processes—from community to national and international levels.The assessment recommends a five-point program of action to apply to known solutions with the intensity needed to eliminate nutritional deprivation. Each dimension of the program is an entry point; while local conditions and existing capacity will determine which one is most appropriate in any one context, ultimately all five dimensions need action for maximum impact.The paper concludes that UNICEF and the World Bank, with their complementary approaches and in partnership with countries and other agencies, should initiate a global effort to jump-start action to eliminate nutritional deprivation once and for all.

178 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2014

About the author

The World Bank Group (WBG) is a family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries. It is the largest and most famous development bank in the world and is an observer at the United Nations Development Group. The bank is based in Washington, D.C. and provided around $61 billion in loans and assistance to "developing" and transition countries in the 2014 fiscal year. The bank's stated mission is to achieve the twin goals of ending extreme poverty and building shared prosperity. Its five organizations are the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

The World Bank's (the IBRD and IDA's) activities are focused on developing countries, in fields such as human development (e.g. education, health), agriculture and rural development (e.g. irrigation and rural services), environmental protection (e.g. pollution reduction, establishing and enforcing regulations), infrastructure (e.g. roads, urban regeneration, and electricity), large industrial construction projects, and governance (e.g. anti-corruption, legal institutions development). The IBRD and IDA provide loans at preferential rates to member countries, as well as grants to the poorest countries. Loans or grants for specific projects are often linked to wider policy changes in the sector or the country's economy as a whole. For example, a loan to improve coastal environmental management may be linked to development of new environmental institutions at national and local levels and the implementation of new regulations to limit pollution, or not, such as in the World Bank financed constructions of paper mills along the Rio Uruguay in 2006.