Pathways for nutrition-sensitive social protection

Abstract

The motivation for bringing a nutritional lens to social protection programs. stems from a widely used conceptual framework for nutrition interventions that groups programs into nutrition-specific and those deemed nutrition-sensitive (Black et al. 2013). Various modeling exercises make it clear that, to address undernutrition, both kinds of program—not just nutrition-specific—need to be components of a long-term strategy. For example, Bhutta et al. (2013) have projected that expanding 10 effective nutrition-specific interventions to meet the needs of 90 percent of the children in the most malnourished countries would decrease stunting by only 20 percent. Similarly, Shekar et al. (2017) envision that scaling up nutrition-specific interventions could achieve only roughly half of the World Health Assembly Target for reducing stunting by 40 percent by 2025. In short, although the arsenal of effective nutrition-specific interventions has been reinforced in recent years (Bhutta et al. 2020, Keats et al. 2021), they remain inadequate to fully address the problem of undernutrition without nutrition-sensitive programs sharing the task.