The Unusual Business Engagement in Nutrition

Who will finance the Sustainable Development Goals, and more specifically the nutrition-related interventions? The estimated minimum investment required to achieve all SDGs is $1.4 trillion/year¹. For SDG 2 (End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture) alone the minimum is $148 billion/year of which almost 50% needs to be privately financed¹. Eleven of the remaining seventeen SDGs contain indicators that are highly relevant for nutrition². These figures tell us that we need to do better in mobilising alternative resources, beyond the traditional donor community, and the government’s own budget. Here are a few of the opportunities for improvement I see in the way we engage business for development outcomes and improved nutrition in particular:  

Diversity: What do you think of when we say business? In the nutrition sector many associate business with food and beverage companies. There is however a much more diverse landscape of businesses which are able to contribute resources and skills to the nutrition relevant targets in the SDGs and most are rarely engaged. Three examples come to mind: Beyond the development-specific investment instruments such as social investment funds, crowd sourcing and development bonds, more traditional private equity firms and large asset management firms can contribute by including investment criteria linked to improved nutrition from the companies they invest in. Why would they do this? Because it makes business sense through improved worker satisfaction, health, productivity and sustainability). Media companies or animation film companies can choose to include nutrition criteria when lending their cartoon characters; retailers can choose to place health foods by the counter for your last minute impulse buy.

The opportunities for working with diverse business sectors to positively shape the food environment are countless - but the tools, incentives, policies and awareness of the benefits are not always available for businesses to engage.  

Innovation:

Innovation is the core of what business is all about: increasing consumption of insects; drone delivery of food and supplements to hard to reach places, effective (emotional) marketing approaches... Let me take just one of these: Business has been able to promote things we don't need and sometimes things that are bad for us while the public nutrition sector struggles to promote healthy diets. It seems sometimes as if nutrition experts find accuracy of technical jargon more important than whether the target population actually understands it, or is impacted by it. Marketeers are experts in influencing consumer’s behaviour: there is so much to learn from them. To innovate, we need more people at the table. 

Sustainability:

The $1.4 trillion/year investment mentioned above is just to achieve the SDGs but what is the investment required to sustain our achievements? Financial sustainability offers perhaps the strongest rational for why we need to engage business. With a strong business case (sometimes the ethical case is not enough), we can establish sustainable models to improve consumption of high quality diets. Some examples of sustainable approaches we have worked on at GAIN include the delivery of micronutrient powders through the market; small, women-run nutritious food production and distribution, door to door sales force delivering products together with behaviour change messages on high quality diets, workplace policies ensuring nutritious foods and behaviour change for workers. There are many more sustainable solutions- not all of them tested. This area needs a strong learning agenda, clear business case analysis and many trials and error to determine what works.

Another aspect of sustainability, which is sometimes overlooked, is the social aspect. Businesses are not abstract institutions; they are integral part of our social infrastructure.  Even where the business case is proven societal pressures can restrict action. For example the business case for gender equality is more than clear and yet according to the World Economic Forum at this rate it will take 170 years to close the gender gap. The good thing is that businesses (from all sectors) have the power to shift social norms critical for improved diets, including gender equality.   

We need to get out of our comfort zone, talk to unusual suspects and show them how eliminating malnutrition in all its forms will help them achieve their goals and help us achieve the nutrition related SDG targets.

The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is a global, Swiss-based foundation that mobilises public-private partnerships and provides financial and technical support to deliver nutritious foods to those people most at risk of malnutrition. For more information on our programs, visit www.gainhealth.org and follow us on Facebook and Twitter

This blog is part of the December 2016 series on Inclusive Business models delivering nutrition, in partnership with DFID and GAIN. Don’t miss the webinar series in January 2017 on Marketing nutrition to the BOP.