The Japan Global Nutrition Summit 2020 will be a follow up to the Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit held in London in 2013, which helped elevate nutrition to be a major component of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The London N4G mainly concentrated on tackling undernutrition (stunting, wasting, and associated child mortality), with a major focus on a child’s first 1,000 days of life and how governments and donors could take action. At the summit, 110 stakeholders made commitments of over USD 4 billion to tackle undernutrition, and USD 19 billion was committed in complementary nutrition-sensitive investments between 2013 and 2020. Business was not a leading player, although the Summit was hosted by Unilever. The London N4G commitments end in 2020, and the Japan Summit is the point at which new commitments for the next decade will be made.
The context and understanding of malnutrition have changed significantly over the seven years since the London N4G. The goals of the 2020 Summit are to position nutrition as an essential driver of sustainable development and to secure new and refreshed policy and financial commitments from governments, civil society, the private sector, donor agencies, and the UN to act on malnutrition in all its forms. Five thematic groups were set up to provide advice to the Government of Japan on the agenda and goals over the summer of 2019. The five goals are to:
- Make nutrition integral to universal health coverage for sustainable development;
- Build food systems that promote healthy diets and nutrition, ensure producers’ livelihoods, and are climate-smart;
- Address malnutrition effectively in fragile and conflict-affected contexts;
- Promote data-driven accountability;
- Secure new investment and drive innovation in nutrition financing.
The Building Business Contributions for the 2020 Global Nutrition Summit conference in The Hague took place as part of Workstream 2 on food systems, which is coordinated by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The Access to Nutrition Foundation (ATNI) and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) were asked by the workstream coordinators to lead consultations on building business contributions as part of this work.