U.S. Government Global Nutrition Coordination Plan 2016-2021

Government Global Nutrition Coordination Plan aims to strengthen the impact of nutrition investments across the U.S. Government through better communication, collaboration, and linking research to program implementation. The Plan seeks to maximize U.S. Government support for country-led programs, enhance global leadership and partnerships, and generate, share, and apply knowledge and evidence in the nutrition sector to accelerate progress toward shared nutrition goals. The U.S. Government is committed to improving nutrition worldwide to enhance health, productivity, and human potential. Key departments and agencies engaged in scaling up approaches to better nutrition and conducting U.S. human research include the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Peace Corps, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Treasury, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Plan identifies six technical focus areas for enhanced coordination: food fortification, nutrition information systems, food safety, the first 1,000 days, nutrition-related non-communicable diseases, and HIV and nutrition. Under each focus area, the U.S. Government will prioritize three approaches to improving coordination: supporting country-led nutrition efforts, promoting leadership and partnership at the global level, and generating, sharing, and applying knowledge and evidence in a systematic manner. The U.S. Government holds itself accountable for seven coordination actions, which provide a backbone for collaborative U.S. Government nutrition programming. These actions include creating a permanent, government-wide Global Nutrition Technical Working Group, releasing an annual summary of interagency progress, producing a U.S. Government report on contributions toward the World Health Assembly Nutrition Targets and U.S. Government global commitments, gathering and reporting interagency information on annual U.S. Government nutrition resource expenditures, forming a U.S. Government Global Nutrition Implementation Sub-Working Group, making U.S. Government nutrition data openly available, and establishing points of contact within each U.S. Government agency participating in the U.S. Government Global Nutrition Coordination Plan. The Plan is a living document that will evolve based on U.S. Government progress and changes in the nutrition landscape. The technical focus areas and key approaches outlined in the Plan provide core examples of U.S. Government activities and commitments in international nutrition, and are not a comprehensive set of actions conducted by each U.S. Government agency nor an inflexible structure for U.S. Government programming. The U.S. Government Global Nutrition Coordination Plan aims to accelerate progress toward the World Health Assembly Nutrition Targets for 2025, which include reducing the number of children under 5 who are stunted by 40%, reducing anemia in women of childbearing age by 50%, reducing low birth weight by 30%, maintaining a low rate of childhood overweight, increasing the rate of exclusive breastfeeding in the first 6 months to at least 50%, and reducing and maintaining childhood wasting to less than 5%.