As aid for nutrition rises in accordance with the proposed Global Investment Framework for Nutrition, it will be increasingly important to track Official Development Assistance (ODA) for nutrition to improve transparency, accountability, and ultimately, timely planning and priority-setting for nutrition. However, two broad challenges exist to track nutrition ODA using the Creditor Reporting System (CRS) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD):
- The purpose code for basic nutrition (12240), which is often used as a proxy for nutrition-specific investments, is not well-aligned with The Lancet definition of nutrition-specific investments; and
- There is currently no systematic way to track nutrition-sensitive investments.
In this policy brief, the authors unpack these challenges and outline two main recommendations. The first recommendation is to better align the basic nutrition purpose code with the widely-accepted definition of nutrition-specific interventions from The Lancet. The second recommendation is to instate a nutrition policy marker to track all nutrition investments across sectors such as agriculture, emergency aid, and water and sanitation. In this way, global nutrition investments can be tracked year-on-year in a standardized and efficient manner.
