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The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) has a great impact on improving nutrition for people globally, despite its limited budget. The impact is achieved by using the bilateral aid to support the partner governments with policy making, working with the legislature and collaborating with the NGOs on the frontline. This holistic approach from the Spanish Agency provides important lessons for discussions at the upcoming Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Conference, which marks the end of a decade of United Nations Action on Nutrition.
From aid recipient to donor in technical cooperation
Spain provides an interesting case study on the long history of development programmes in nutrition. Until 1976, Spain was a recipient of development aid. However, now it is one of the global leaders in technical cooperation in food and nutrition – providing knowledge, expertise, and resources in developing nutrition policies and interventions on the Right to Food.
The 2000s were a turning point for the Spanish Agency as a result of social movement demanding 0.7% of GDP for development aid. The government and political parties came to a consensus across the political spectrum and approved the Estrategia de Lucha Contra el Hambre (Strategy to Fight Hunger). However, the global crisis of 2008 forced the Agency to prioritise its interventions amidst budget restraints.
The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) indicator analysis shows that Spanish Agency’s interventions in nutrition have evolved positively from simple and focused projects between 2002-2007 to comprehensive and multisectoral interventions more recently between 2014-2022. These interventions include funding FAO’s Right to Food team, and the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger. There has also been a greater attention to sustainability, resilience, strengthening of local capacities, empowerment of women and adaptation to climate change over time.
Nutrition is political: Lessons learned
Cooperation between different actors in nutrition makes a particular impact when nutrition is integrated with other sectors such as agriculture, water and sanitation and intersects into other development priorities such as gender, climate and health. Cooperation needs to focus on development of state policies with the collaboration on parliamentary fronts supported by the right to food. Below are the key lessons learned from the Spanish Cooperation and their innovative approach to nutrition.
- Collaboration with Parliamentary Fronts is an innovative strategy that places nutrition at the centre of legislation, addressing it in all its forms and multidimensionally, laying the foundations for important transformations in the territories. In addition, it strengthens democratic practices by bringing together parliamentarians from different parties to discuss food issues, leaving aside party-political overtones.
- Support and alignment with state policies based on the right to food is essential for good nutrition, through the agency’s commitment to strengthening the state policies of the partner country and respect for the planning and management of public policies.
- Measuring malnutrition should not be depoliticised. Nutrition has been seen exclusively as a health issue, but this overlooks the social and political elements that contribute to poor nutrition. Whilst there is a need to obtain reliable and objective data on malnutrition, establishing the political causes of this malnutrition is key. An accurate assessment of malnutrition is necessary with instruments such as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) whilst simultaneously denouncing famine as an instrument of genocide in Gaza perpetrated by Israel.
- Nutritional interventions must be based on a context analysis to be effective. Understanding the political, economic and sociocultural dimensions of the territory allows for the design of strategies for improving nutrition to be adapted to each community. The anthropology of health and nutrition has been useful in countries such as Niger and Peru to understand how eating habits and industrialisation affect nutrition, allowing traditional recipes to be rescued and cultural changes to be promoted towards more nutritious diets.
- The territorial and community approach strengthens the impact of nutrition policies and is key to sustainability. The articulation of policies and programs in the territories decentralises decision-making and promotes the participation of subnational governments, facilitating the adaptation of policies to the characteristics of each territory. Experiences in Niger, Guatemala and Mozambique show that combining nutrition interventions with community development improves dietary diversification and prevents malnutrition in all its phases. However, community work requires a policy mirroring at the national level, which provides support to processes at the local level.
- Ensuring nutrition is mainstreamed, intersectoral and multidimensional. The Spanish cooperation has been working on a multidimensional view of nutrition, focusing on food security, integrating production, climate change, health, water and sanitation. The gender perspective has also been mainstreamed in these initiatives.
Recommendations for the future of cooperation in nutrition
- Nutrition interventions must be based on the Right to Food, by providing an appropriate framework to overcome framings of aid as charity or as an instrument of foreign policy. The right to food needs to be seen as an enforceable right, guaranteed by states. This requires theparticipation of various actors with states as guarantors strengthening their responsibility for its fulfilment.
- Strengthening global accountability in nutrition. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is the multilateral instrument used for this purpose, but beyond the figures invested in the nutrition indicator, it is essential to know the interventions that generate the greatest impact and their achievements; separating actions aimed at reducing poverty, and the use of cooperation as an instrument of foreign or trade policy. Defending these multilateral accountability mechanisms is crucial.
- Strengthen territorial and community-based approaches in nutrition policies and legislation. Interventions must continue to be linked to the economic, socio-political and cultural dynamics of the territories, ensuring the participation of local governments and communities to guarantee their sustainability.
- Funding NGOs and other civil society actors as they play a fundamental role in the implementation and monitoring of nutritional policies. Bilateral cooperation and funding for NGOs that are complementary under rights-based strategies is successful. When civil society funding is coordinated with public strategies based on the right to food, NGOs’ knowledge of the territory and proximity to communities facilitate the adaptation of policies and the monitoring of impacts. In addition, their advocacy role has been key to broadening the vision of nutrition beyond the technical and medical.
- Establish prioritisation mechanisms for interventions in acute and chronic malnutrition in accordance with the strengths of each Cooperation Agency, to achieve maximum impact and promote their complementarity in each territory. Spanish Agency’s work shows how essential it is to generate projects in middle-income countries, where inequality also translates into undernutrition, but also into overweight and obesity, which challenges aid agencies to lead dual-purpose interventions.
To read in detail about the lessons learned by the Spanish Cooperation about nutrition interventions, see the Guide we prepared for the integration of nutrition in cooperation interventions for the AECID.
