Neema Lugangira is Co-Chair of the SUN Movement Executive Committee, Secretary General of Women Political Leaders (WPL) and former Member of Parliament in Tanzania (2020–2025).
Financing nutrition in an age of aid collapse and global instability
By Neema Lugangira
A triple shock is converging on Africa’s food and nutrition security: collapsing official development assistance (ODA), escalating global instability and climate disruption. The international aid architecture that once cushioned countries against such crises is no longer reliable in timing, volume or political will. Africa must chart a different course.
Each successive global crisis, Covid-19, the war in Ukraine and now the conflict spreading across the Middle East, has laid bare how fragile financing to tackle malnutrition truly is, and how exposed African populations remain to shocks originating far beyond the continent. The full consequences of the current Middle East conflict are still unfolding, but the risk is already visible: up to 30 per cent of the world’s fertiliser exports is transported through the Strait of Hormuz. A prolonged disruption there will not stay in the region. It will arrive on African farms, in African markets, and in African homes.
Food and nutrition security is not a humanitarian footnote, it is foundational to human capital and to the continent's long-term economic development. The costs of undernutrition are estimated at up to 16 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in parts of Africa, and the African Union cites chronic undernutrition as a primary challenge to economic development, with half of African nations having high (over 30 %) prevalence rates of childhood stunting. No economy can absorb that toll indefinitely, and no development agenda can succeed while carrying it.
The moment calls for anticipatory action. Africa needs predictable financial flows that embed nutrition into health systems, food systems, and both humanitarian and climate response. Crucially, this need not always mean new money. Integrating nutrition across these sectors creates real opportunities for governments to work with existing budget lines, in agriculture, water, education and social protection, and direct them towards nutrition outcomes. It is an approach that builds political ownership, stretches available resources further and reduces dependence on external financing cycles.
We also need a fundamental shift in how development finance institutions think about nutrition, recognising that borrowing to invest in nutrition yields returns that rival, and in many cases exceed, traditional infrastructure investments. The return on each US dollar (USD) invested in nutrition is 23 USD, making nutrition the single most cost-effective development intervention. The African Development Bank has a significant role to play here, and the continent’s governments should be making that case forcefully.
African philanthropies also represent a significant and still largely untapped source of that ambition. These are institutions capable of absorbing longer time horizons and operating outside the political constraints that limit traditional aid. Bringing them into a more deliberate coalition with governments and regional development banks is one of the more promising levers available to us.
Encouragingly, some of the architecture for this shift is already in place. The Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement has been central to positioning nutrition within the African Union’s CAADP 2025 Kampala Declaration, and has supported regional bodies including ECOWAS and CILSS in mainstreaming nutrition across policy sectors, agriculture, water, sanitation and beyond. These are not small achievements. They are the foundations on which a bolder, more self-directed approach to systems change can be built.
The coming weeks offer a concrete opportunity to press these arguments on the global stage. The One Health Summit in Lyon, France, on the 7th April will assess progress against the 28 billion USD in commitments made at the Nutrition for Growth Summit in Paris in 2025. It is a moment to hold governments and institutions accountable, and to elevate nutrition within broader discussions of economic resilience and global health security. The subsequent Africa Forward Summit, to be held jointly by France and Kenya in Nairobi in May, carries these conversations to a continental audience. Africa should seize the opportunity to own and shape that conversation to make nutrition an essential pillar of the continent’s future economic security, not an add-on externally financed through aid.
The international system has shown through successive crises that aid flows alone cannot guarantee the predictability that nutrition financing requires. This is not a failure of intent, for many partners remain deeply committed, but a reflection of how geopolitics, fiscal pressures and competing priorities inevitably shape what is possible. The tools, the mandates and the momentum are there. The task now is to use them and to build the kind of African-owned, resilient nutrition financing architecture that can endure whatever the next global shock brings.
References and further reading:
Glauber, Joseph: The Iran war: Potential food security impacts. IFPRI, 05.03.2025.
World Food programme: Ending malnutrition.
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