The Vulnerability, Poverty and Reduction (VPR) team’s work on hunger and nutrition is bringing together critical insights from development and nutrition research. We inform current debates about nutrition policy by drawing on IDS’s expertise in poverty, politics, governance, value chains, food insecurity, agriculture, health, gender, climate change and conflict and fragile contexts.

Our research and evaluation activities aim to provide evidence on how to accelerate and scale up direct and indirect nutrition interventions. We undertake research on how to build the political and financial enabling environment necessary to sustain real progress in tackling global undernutrition. This focus on building an enabling environment forms an overarching framework for our research.

We focus on three core themes critical to accelerating reductions in undernutrition:

• Building political commitment: What are the incentives and motivations of elected and non-elected leaders to include nutrition goals in national development agendas and ensure policy continuity over time?
• Mobilising resources for undernutrition reduction: How do we build and sustain the step-change in financing and human resources required to tackle undernutrition? How do we leverage resources in the private sector and from natural resource revenues?
• Promoting research uptake: How do we create greater demand and capacity for evidence at the intersection of nutrition and development research? How do we get this evidence into use so that it has a lasting impact?