Tropentag, September 17 - 19, 2018 in Ghent "Global food security and food safety: The role of universities"

DEVCO Nutrition Commitments and its Discontents

Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Institute of Development Research and Development Policy, Germany

Abstract

The European Union is a major player in the field of nutrition in the context of international development cooperation. The major target of this research project is the detection of the factors determining the geography of the EU international cooperation and development (DEVCO) nutrition commitments and disbursements. Due to the limited data on nutrition investments the project relies on the data of 2012 and 2013. Methodologically the project relies on the evaluation tools provided by Scaling Up Nutrition Principles (SUN Methodology). These enable classification of the projects in nutrition specific and unspecific ones. All the results of the project are based on the nutrition specific projects.

There is a huge gap between countries regarding nutrition investments per stunted child. Analysis of the average DEVCO nutrition commitment per stunted child in each country over the last two years further shows that DEVCO's nutrition investments are unevenly distributed over the countries.

The data shows that DEVCO's nutrition commitments over the last two years have only been weakly linked to countries with the highest numbers of stunted children. Taking the top ten recipient countries of DEVCO nutrition commitments, it can be seen that the countries receiving the highest commitments are not the countries with the highest number of stunted children.

Stunting rate, in contrast to the absolute number of stunted children and regional dummy (sub-Saharan Africa), are the only statistically significant determinants of the country-specific DEVCO nutrition investment per stunted child (IV-OLS estimation). The estimation suggests that there is even a slightly negative association between the number of stunted children and nutrition investment per stunted child. The results suggest that there is a need for a better coordination of the geography of the DEVCO nutrition investments which would result in a better and efficient coverage of the investments in reducing malnutrition.

Keywords: DEVCO nutrition commitments, scaling up nutrition, stunting rate, sub-Saharan Africa

Contact Address: Elkhan Richard Sadik-Zada, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Institute of Development Research and Development Policy, Auf der Rohfackel 4, 44801 Bochum, Germany, e-mail: sadikebdrub.de