COMCEC

Malnutrition in the OIC Member

Countries: A Trap for Poverty

Rates of malnutrition in the region have also remained unacceptably high: rates of wasting

have remained stuck at 9% over the last ten years, while stunting has declined very slowly,

reducing only by three percentage points between 1990 and 2011. In addition to the unsolved

challenge of undernutrition, overnutrition is also becoming a problem among women of

reproductive age (and to a lesser extent among children under five). The majority of countries

in the region are off course in meeting three out four World Health Assembly 2025 targets

(Seki, Sablah, and Bendech 2016).

Why the relative lack of progress? While West Africa includes many different organisations

working on issues of food security and nutrition, there is no unique, harmonised multi-sectoral

coordinating mechanism for food and nutrition security in the region. While there are a

number of different organisations in the regions (CILSS, WAHO, etc), all seem to work on their

own without significant alignment to regional objectives, leading to poor coordination and

continued weak integration between the nutrition and agriculture sectors (Seki, Sablah, and

Bendech 2016).

In 2015 Action Contre la Faim undertook an analysis of nutrition policies in 11 West African

countries, which was supplemented by two case studies from Mali and Mauritania to

understand the range of nutrition sensitive policies which are included in these country

policies as well as potential challenges in implementing these policies. Key findings from this

synthesis include:

• The SUNmovement has helped many West African countries to develop multi-sectoral

nutrition policies and plans.

• Despite the fact that most policies recognise the need for multi-sectoral responses to

malnutrition, the health sector tends to support most nutrition specific actions and

also is likely to receive requests from other sectors to monitor nutrition sensitive

interventions.

• The agricultural sector, overall, has remained uninvolved in nutrition efforts,

continuing to focus on increasing productivity over nutrition despite efforts to make

agricultural policies more nutrition sensitive.

• While there has been a large increase in the number of multi-sectoral frameworks, the

actual implementation of these frameworks has been hampered by weak coordination

capacity at national and subnational levels.

• Subnational level government tend to have little awareness of nutrition programmes

and receive insufficient resources to improve local efforts (Bichard and Leturque

2015).

West African nutrition policies and frameworks will only work if there is strong and effective

coordination among the many actors working in the domain of regional food security and

nutrition. Additionally, agricultural programmes in the region must be made more nutrition

sensitive.