African Development Bank (AfDB) launches nutrition scorecard

Alongside the African Union Commission and global partners, the African Development Bank (AfDB) recently launched a “Continental Nutrition Accountability Scorecard” to support greater advocacy and accountability for nutrition investments in Africa.

Produced by African Leaders for Nutrition (ALN), an initiative headquartered at the Bank, the scorecard serves as a key advocacy tool highlighting the progress of both individual countries and of the continent as a whole towards achieving nutrition targets. It tracks the status of nutrition goals based on twelve indicators clustered in four categories: nutrition status; coverage of services; governance, policy, and legal provisions; and socio-economic impact.

The scorecard’s initial findings show that half of African countries have stunting prevalence rates of above 30%, illustrating that the rate of stunting remains a serious cause for concern across the continent.

Alongside the release of the scorecard, ALN issued a set of recommendations for African heads of state and government to improve their countries’ progress towards achieving nutrition goals. These recommendations included: increasing budgetary allocations towards implementation of multisectoral nutrition plans, to address the conditions that produce malnutrition; and spearheading country efforts to avail timely and quality data on nutrition to support measurement, accountability and learning.

Big Win Philanthropy has been pleased to support the development of the scorecard. Big Win Chair and President, Jamie Cooper, is also proud to serve as an ALN Champion, working alongside global public and private sector leaders including former Ghanaian president John Kufuor, African Union Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat, former Mozambican Education Minister Graça Machel, Bill Gates and others to promote accelerated investment and political leadership to address malnutrition challenges in Africa.

The release of the scorecard also complements Big Win’s work with the AfDB on the Banking on Nutrition program, which aims to catalyze nutrition-smart investments to support a 40% stunting reduction in Africa by 2025.

For more information about the scorecard and the African Leaders for Nutrition initiative, watch the video below.