The Minister for Africa and Development, spoke at the Global Food
Security Summit in London on creating new approaches to ending
preventable deaths of children.
Ladies and gentlemen, Your Excellencies, friends.
This is the first of four sessions that I mentioned entitled
Creating new approaches to ending preventable deaths of children.
And we’ve got here for the session some of the best minds in the
world for tackling this subject. We’ve got an hour and a half to
try to make real progress and I want to thank everyone in advance
for focusing so hard on this vital subject.
We know that too many children are going to bed hungry and
malnourished. It’s a point the Prime Minister set out right at
the beginning of his remarks. And we are here united in our
determination to change that – bringing all your expertise and
experience to bear.
And as you know, we launched the UK International Development
White Paper today, setting out our long-term vision for
addressing critical global challenges.
This includes preventing and treating child wasting, through new
partnerships and sources of finance.
The collective effort to produce the White Paper drew on the most
expert minds in the business, including charities and NGOs, the
private sector, academia and our partners abroad.
It’s been an enormous undertaking, and I am hugely grateful to
those of you who shared your expertise.
This morning we are bringing that expertise together again, with
a focus on child malnutrition.
This summit is an important opportunity to galvanise action,
shifting the dial to do more on prevention.
I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts on how we can
enhance preventative measures, build resilience and optimise
funding, in order to have the biggest impact.
A huge part of this will be vital scientific research. We’ve
already seen some big breakthroughs over the years, with
ready-to-use foods like plumpy nut, for managing child wasting in
the community.
This ground-breaking work dramatically reduced the need for
inpatient care, increased the uptake of treatment and saved
countless lives across the world.
We need more breakthroughs like this.
That’s why the Foreign Office is supporting an ambitious research
programme through ELRHA, to build a package of evidence-based
interventions in nutrition, health, water and sanitation.
We are also proud of our work together with UNICEF. Since we
launched our partnership three years ago to drive progress on
child wasting, UNICEF has recorded some impressive results in the
nine targeted countries.
Last year, more than four million children were reached with
essential nutrition support like Vitamin A, a 60 per cent
increase on the year before.
And the proportion of children given lifesaving treatment for
severe wasting increased from a third in 2021 to nearly half last
year.
We are continuing our work together with UNICEF to catalyse more
sustainable financing, build stronger supply chains and help
prevent, detect and treat child wasting.
I am also delighted to announce that we will extend this
fantastic partnership to 2030, the year when the white paper
ends, and double our funding with an additional nearly £31
million bringing the total to £61 million.
We will be working with UNICEF and our partners, including many
of you here today, to campaign for action to reach at least 350
million mothers and children with services to prevent, detect and
treat child wasting in the hardest hit regions of the world.
Now I am delighted today to be co-chairing this session with
UNICEF’s Deputy Executive Director, Omar Abdi, and I am looking
forward to hearing from him very shortly.
We are also working together with the World Health Organisation
and World Food Programme to strengthen the evidence for
preventing and treating child wasting.
The WHO is today launching new guidelines, including, for the
first time, on prevention. And I am delighted that WHO Director
General Tedros is with us this morning and I am looking forward
to hearing from him.
We are committed to implementing these guidelines and supporting
you, our partners, to do the same.
As the Prime Minister announced this morning, the new funding for
UNICEF includes a further £16 million for the Child Nutrition
Fund, which we are inaugurating this morning alongside our
partners, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Children’s
Investment Fund Foundation, where we had that fantastic
announcement by Sir Chris Hohn of his additional $50 million.
This is not just a UK-UNICEF partnership. It is, crucially, a
partnership with the ten countries that have joined us in using
the Child Nutrition Fund Match-window to double supplies of
therapeutic food within their health systems. And we hope more
countries will join them.
I’m glad that Pakistan’s minister of health, Nadeem Jan, is with
us, and we look forward to hearing more about this from him.
It is clear there is a great deal of expertise and determination
in this room, so let us use this session, and this summit, to
inspire each other to reach greater heights, save lives, and
build a healthier future for the world’s children.
