About the Child Nutrition Fund

The Child Nutrition Fund (CNF) is a UNICEF-led coordination and funding mechanism designed to accelerate the scale-up of sustainable policies, programmes and supplies to end child undernutrition in high-need countries.

The CNF mobilizes resources to accelerate the implementation of evidence-based, high-impact actions designed to tackle key nutrition challenges, including stunting, wasting and anaemia in children and women. The CNF empowers countries to accelerate progress in achieving their national commitments to the nutrition of children and women and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Why do we need a Child Nutrition Fund?

Why do we need a Child Nutrition Fund?

The current global and national responses to malnutrition in children and women are often inadequate, particularly in contexts with high numbers of children and women at risk of, or suffering from, the more extreme forms of undernutrition. The CNF has been designed as a response to three challenges:

There is no platform to support global donors to coordinate their investments in high-impact nutrition actions.
This means that some interventions, regions or countries are oversupplied, while others are underfunded.

There is no dedicated mechanism to incentivze a transition from global funding to domestic funding and to coordinate that transition.
This means that there is limited incentive for national governments to commit domestic funding for essential nutrition actions and supplies.

There is no dedicated mechanism to support local manufacturing of therapeutic and complementary foods and nutrition supplements in low- and middle-income countries. This means that locally- or regionally-produced essential nutrition supplies cannot be procured when and where they are needed.