Amid Humanitarian Crisis, These Three Funders Are Supporting Nutrition in Ethiopia
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Food market in Tigray, Ethiopia in 2019. fivepointsix/shutterstock
A raging civil war has created a profound humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia, killing thousands and making refugees out of millions of citizens.
Amid conflicting ideas of a strong central state and the independent interests of warring ethnic groups, even the U.S. government is considering pulling up stakes, recently advising in-country citizens to depart now, as the conflict closes in. That comes nearly a year after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s failed move to quell an uprising of regional rebels in Tigray, who are now mounting an offensive of their own.
Meanwhile, terrible suffering has been reported, and famine looms. Nearly 200 children died of starvation in hospitals across Tigray between June and October, against reports that essential humanitarian aid has been blocked.
Amid this context, the Power of Nutrition, a U.K.-based charitable foundation that builds cross-sector alliances to address malnutrition, pulled together a partnership of three funders: The END Fund, Rotary International and the Eleanor Crook Foundation. Their collective funds, when matched by additional partners, will create a $30.1 million aid program funded over five years.
Here’s what you need to know about this concerted effort to address a hot-button issue, while the center may not hold.
Multiplying impact
The Power of Nutrition employs a finance and partnership model that brings in players from across sectors in to multiply the impact of nutrition funding, acting as a platform for “pooling resources.” The organization works in 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia with high rates of malnutrition.
The six-year old organization specifically focuses on children. The Power of Nutrition applies a “lifecycle approach” to programming, with interventions that focus on key windows of opportunity for preventing and mitigating the impacts of stunting—for example, the first 1,000 days between conception and age two.
Initially co-founded by the U.K. government (DFID) and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF), programs back national government plans, and are organized around a core set of strategies that are proven to improve child, adolescent and maternal nutrition.
Tactics in Ethiopia
The current initiative will engage partners in the prevention and treatment of wasting, a visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition in which low body weight weakens children’s immune systems and opens the door to developmental delays, disease and death. The funding initiative will address immediate wasting interventions, as well as research to build long-term resiliency.
The alliance will also employ proven measures of improving hunger outcomes for women, infants and children, including feeding practices that integrate multiple micronutrient supplementation (MMS), and deworming.
Three partners
The group can achieve more collectively than would be possible as individual actors, and the partnership brings new voices to the table. The Power of Nutrition called the trio “particularly significant” because it introduces two new “powerful partners” to the nutrition space: Rotary and the END Fund.
The partnership seeks to leverage the expertise of all three parties, including the Eleanor Crook Foundation’s recognized achievements in childhood wasting and advocacy, Rotary’s broad reach and communications abilities, and the END Fund’s proven success in deworming.
Simon Bishop, CEO of the Power of Nutrition, said the potential impact is enormous. “As we’ve learned from convening over 40 strategic partnerships for nutrition, the power of collaboration in development cannot be underestimated.”
Eleanor Crook Foundation
For more than two decades, the Eleanor Crook Foundation (ECF) has been seeking solutions to global malnutrition. Co-founder Eleanor Crook is the granddaughter of the founder of H-E-B, a major grocery store chain in Texas, and has served on the company’s board for more than 40 years.
Built on the premise that every child has a right to be nourished, the foundation has a robust portfolio in research, policy, and advocacy specific to the issues of nutrition, including Nourish the Future, a coalition-led initiative that aims to cut severe malnutrition by half across nine high-burden countries.
Eleanor and William Crook traveled widely when he served as the national director of AmeriCorps VISTA and U.S. Ambassador to Australia. Ethiopia has been a focus of its work since William Crook traveled there, and the country’s been a priority for several years. Additional in-country initiatives include investments in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s trial of the MAMI (management of at-risk mothers and infants under six months) Care Pathway, and a grant co-funded with CIFF to pilot guidance on the integration of wasting treatment into health systems.
ECF has committed significant resources to combating malnutrition since its founding in 1997. In 2017, the foundation committed $100 million toward combating malnutrition over the next decade. To date, grants exceed $70 million.
The END Fund
The END Fund is a U.S.-based philanthropic initiative that’s focused on eradicating five of the world’s most rampant neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Bacterial and parasitic diseases like intestinal worms and river blindness impact more than 1.7 billion people globally. A billion are children.
The fund engages a community of “activist-philanthropists” to rally private funds. Work engages cross sector collaborations to advance national disease programs tailored to the needs of individual countries. Since 2012, the END Fund and its partners have distributed more than 1 billion treatments across 31 countries, and trained more than 3.5 million healthcare workers in treatment protocols.
Ellen Agler, CEO of the END Fund, said that Ethiopia has been a priority in the “normal course” of its work “because it is one of the top three highest-burden countries for NTDs in Africa.” NTDs from intestinal worms to river blindness are “all endemic in the country.”
The END Fund is one of the lead investors supporting control efforts of the Ethiopian Ministry of Health for schistosomiasis and intestinal worms, as well as a key funder of the country’s goal to eliminate trachoma through surgery. Its Reaching the Last Mile Fund, a 10-year initiative to eliminate river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, also touches down in Ethiopia.
Agler said the partners’ collaborative model helped secure its support. “NTDs diminish nutritional absorption and lead to stunted growth. Conversely, malnourished individuals are more susceptible to NTDs,” affecting health and longevity. “For that reason, this partnership was appealing to us because it helped us to leverage our collective resources to foster healthier communities.”
Rotary International
Rotary represents a global network of 1.5 million volunteer leaders worldwide, drawing from 46,000 clubs in more than 200 countries. Members collectively focus on tackling the “world’s most pressing humanitarian challenges” in “our own backyards and across the world.”
It’s spent more than three decades working toward a polio-free world, and was a founding partner of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Cases have been reduced by 99.9% since its first foray into polio vaccinations in the Philippines, in 1979.
All told, Rotary members have raised more than $2 billion to protect 3 billion children in 122 countries from the disease, and have directly advocated for more than $10 billion in governmental support, according to the network.
John Hewko, CEO of Rotary International, said it’s now using lessons learned to help impact childhood nutrition. “The effects of malnutrition on a child’s physical and mental development can profoundly and permanently limit the trajectory of their lives. When an entire generation suffers from stunting and wasting, families and whole communities and nations are impacted by a catastrophic loss of potential. As we’ve learned from our global effort to eradicate polio, we know that by leveraging each of our strengths, we can make a significant impact together to give children in Ethiopia access to nutrition and a chance for a full and healthy future.”
Breaking though
UNICEF and Action Against Hunger will implement the program, working closely with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health. Both organizations have been working in the region for decades, and are no strangers to the challenges of war and regime change—both immediate factors in program delivery.
Over the span of five years, the program aims to reach 1 million or more pregnant women, and 3 million children with nutritional deficits. Partners’ collective public health, development, and advocacy work seeks to build long-term resiliency, delivering long-term nutrition for all.
