How much is being spent to tackle hunger and malnutrition?
After many nights of reading through papers by the likes of the UN and WHO, data on government domestic and international spending as well as releases and annual reports of some of the largest charities fighting hunger globally – the truth is I couldn’t confidently say how much is spent tackling malnutrition annually, let alone how this is split and the impact this is happening.
In my first post I raised the question of whether more investment in technological innovation was needed to truly beat hunger and malnutrition, given there remains over 800 million people who are chronically hungry and progress over the last few years of bringing this number down having slowed. In my last post I explored some of the models and cost estimates of what it would actually take to eradicate hunger in the next 10 or so years, although there still seems to be no consensus on the best way to achieve this. Therefore, in order to start making some headway in answering my own question it seemed only logical to next look at what is invested / spent today, what is being invested in and what impact this is having.
Ultimately this appears to be a tougher question to answer than I had hoped. The reason for this is best outlined by the following quotes from the 2020 Global Nutrition Report (which identifies critical actions to achieve nutrition equity based on in-depth analysis):
‘Data is disparate, incomplete or incomparable’
‘Data on intervention costs, cost-effectiveness and return on investment is also limited’
‘Despite some recent progress on improved resource tracking for nutrition-sensitive programmes, there are still significant data gaps within sectors critical to transforming nutrition – including health, agriculture, social protection, water, sanitation and hygiene, and education’
Drawing some conclusions
Despite this and having neither the time or resource to try and complete a fully fledged analysis on my own, focusing on some key bits of data and insights there definitely do appear to be a number of themes that emerge.
- Spend is focused in 5 key areas to tackle malnutrition, aligned to the sectors of spending highlighted in various models on eradicating hunger I explored in my last post.
These are water & sanitation, health, social protection, education and agriculture – with social protection and health taking the largest share of domestic spend (see below the split of domestic spend on nutrition based on 45 countries between 2015 and 2019).
- The majority of available resources are being used to support emergency responses, which are increasingly required as a result of conflict and global warming.
For example, according to their latest annual report, in 2018 Action Against Hunger UK signed 20 new contracts and grants with a total value of £33.9m from UK Government funding (UK Aid), £32m of which went to emergency responses.
This highlights the difficulty to invest in innovation for the future given we are struggling to cope with the increasing challenges of today.
- Whilst Government (e.g. innovate UK) and charity funding to support new innovative companies and technologies in these sectors does exist, companies seem to largely depend on the private sector for investment. For social enterprises this can be a significant challenge.
How are social enterprises getting funded?
Social enterprises and startups looking to have a positive impact on food, health or agricultural sectors must rely heavily on venture capital investments. The reality of being funded in this way means social enterprises with a split focus between profits and an underlying cause / issue must compete for investment with companies solely focused on making money. Investors ultimately want to be confident in achieving a return on their investment in a short time frame and with this often being a challenge for social enterprises, investment and therefore innovation falls short of other sectors.
The result of this is that agriculture and food tech is a decade behind other sectors in terms of innovation and adoption of new technologies – with $14 billion in investments in 1,000 food systems-focused start-ups since 2010, compared to healthcare which has attracted $145 billion in investment in 18,000 start-ups during the same time period.
Making a change
Whilst I may not have a full and final answer on exactly what is spent today on tackling hunger and malnutrition, I get the feeling that due to a lack of availability and consistency of data probably nobody does – at least not fully.
Whilst this is frustrating for me, it is a critical problem for trying to align the various global governments, charities and companies taking on the challenge of eradicating world hunger. Without being able to tie back progress or lack thereof to specific initiatives there is little ability to focus and optimise spend to be most effective and ultimately reduce the timeframe for ridding the world of hunger.
To me it seems like investment in new technologies in the food and agricultural sectors is on the low end but without the data to compare the impacts of these investments to international programmes, emergency responses and lobbying for policy change it seems close to impossible to make the case today to increase public and charity funding in this area. However, as a first step in the right direction I would like to see governments put in place policies that encourage investments for social enterprises to ultimately close the gap seen in the adoption of new technologies across food and agriculture.
References:
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/global-nutrition-report-world-hunger-malnutrition/
https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/forecast-2020-financial-meltdown-and-malnutrition
https://globalnutritionreport.org/reports/2020-global-nutrition-report/
https://apps.who.int/nha/database
Click to access WEF_Innovation_with_a_Purpose_VF-reduced.pdf
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