With nearly half-a-billion of the world’s undernourished people living in Asia-Pacific – and with the 2030 deadline for Zero Hunger just a decade away – there is a need for urgent action to address hunger in all its forms and to take decisive, informed and coordinated action to place nutrition at the heart of social protection programmes.
Social protection programmes command large resource flows compared with nutrition interventions, but their success in fighting poverty does not necessarily translate into success in reducing malnutrition. It is now well understood that the design of these programmes can be enhanced to maximize and sustain important food security and nutrition results, and this, in turn, will generate higher economic returns throughout people’s lifecycles.
Drawing on the wealth of evidence gathered for the 2019 Asia and the Pacific Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition —SOFI report— this webinar discussed some of the evidence available in the region and the possible reasons behind the lack of clear impact of these social protection programmes on nutrition outcomes.