Gender and Nutrition Advocacy and communications Toolkit

Join us in marking this International Women's Day - click here to access our resources and information on our activities

🚺♀️👧

Content:

Click on the hyperlinks to jump to the specific sections

Familiarize yourself with the gender and nutrition key messages
Join us in marking this International Women's Day 2024
Learn how you can take action
Download and share our social media assets

Gender inequality is both a cause and effect of malnutrition, hunger and poverty.

Source: UNICEF Undernourished and Overlooked Report

♀️ More than a billion adolescent girls and women around the world suffer from undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies and/or anaemia.

♀️ More than two thirds of adolescent girls and women 15-49 suffer from micronutrient deficiencies and nearly 1 in 3 adolescents are anaemic.

♀️ Over half a billion women and girls are at risk of poor cognitive and motor development, fatigue, loss of productivity, premature birth, low birth weight and maternal mortality due to anaemia.

♀️ Moreover, 51 million children under the age of 2 are stunted and evidence indicates that approximately half these children become stunted in utero through the first six months after birth while dependent on their mother for nutrition.

We will not succeed in scaling up nutrition if we do not address the drivers and impacts of gender-based discrimination. And on the flip side, nutrition can provide an entry point to address gender inequities.

Gender inequality dictates who eats last and least, access to health and nutrition services, decision making over household resources, food production and consumption; all of which directly impact maternal nutrition and perpetuate intergenerational cycles of malnutrition.

At the same time, nutrition investments provide important entry points to addressing the underlying drivers of inequality, including educational opportunities, household power and income distribution, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and gender-based violence and harmful practices – including child, early and forced marriage.

The Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement recognizes that the empowerment of women and girls must be at the centre of nutrition action.

Gender responsive and transformative nutrition approaches not only address the unique nutritional needs and challenges faced by women and girls and other marginalized groups. They also aim to transform underlying systems that shape and govern policies, program implementation, service delivery as well as social norms and beliefs that influence agency, decision making power and ownership over resources.

Investing in Nutrition is Investing in Women.

For these reasons, the SUN Movement champions and prioritises efforts to integrate gender equality and nutrition action, ensure healthy nutrition practices are accessible to more women and girls, and empower more women and girls to be centred in efforts to fight malnutrition.

With this communications toolkit, the SUN Movement aims to:

Amplify the initiatives that countries are carrying out to scale up gender-transformative nutrition actions
Support countries in raising awareness on the essential links that connect nutrition, women’s empowerment and the benefits of gender equality for all individuals, families, societies and nations
Call on all stakeholders to integrate a gender lens as part of good nutrition, food security and the reduction of inequalities

Check out our key messages

International Women's Day 2024

This International Women’s Day will be marked around the world on 8 March 2024 under the theme Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress.

This theme calls on everyone to play their part, investing in women as a human rights issue, ending poverty, implementing gender-responsive financing, shifting to a green economy and care society and supporting feminist change-makers.

What does this mean for the nutrition community? Investing in nutrition is part of investing in women and girls.

Here are a few examples of how SUN members are investing in nutrition and investing in women this International Women’s Day and beyond.

Gender and Nutrition: EmPower the Change

Leading up to the SUN Global Gathering and the Nutrition For Growth Summit, the SUN Movement is launching a webinar series aiming to facilitate in-depth discussions and learning between SUN Countries and Networks on gender mainstreaming in nutrition policy and action to help strengthen national nutrition commitments, implementation and accountability.

Each webinar will discuss policy and program design, implementation and accountability: highlight learnings from SUN countries and stakeholders about how gender intersects with the topic of discussion and; identify best practices and areas of improvement based on 5 core themes:

➔ Policy Coherence: take a multi-sectoral and systems approach to mainstream gender responsive nutrition action across policies and operations

➔ Inclusion and Decision-Making: actively engage women, girls and youth in design, implementation, evaluation and decision-making

➔ Gender-transformative nutrition interventions: learn from implementers and researchers about gender-transformative nutrition actions - discussing issues of effectiveness and scale

➔ Gender Budgeting and Financing: explore the allocation of resources and financing needs that will be effective in closing gender nutrition gaps.

➔ Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning: address gaps in data and tools/resources for implementing gender sensitive and responsive indicators

Stay tuned and sign up here to receive invitations to the webinar series

Sign up

Closing the Gender Nutrition Gap learning trip in Viet Nam

Following the Global Webinar Series on Closing the Gender Nutrition Gap, which was jointly organised by the SUN CSN Secretariat, SUN CSA Viet Nam and FHI 360, the SUN CSN Secretariat sponsored 14 participants to travel to Viet Nam (January 8 –12) to attend the in-person component of the training.

Participants represented Cambodia, Colombia, Ecuador, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Uganda and Viet Nam. All participants have developed an action plan on how they will implement their learnings. Within the next few weeks, participants will receive feedback on their action plans and technical support from mentors to support the implementation of their action plans.

Guidelines for measuring gender transformative change in the context of food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture

In the framework of the EU-RBA Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition (JP GTA), FAO, IFAD, WFP and the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform developed “Guidelines for measuring gender transformative change in the context of food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture” aimed at enhancing the capacity of research and development partners to design, implement, monitor and evaluate gender transformative interventions. They include step-by-step guidance to formulate qualitative and quantitative indicators and present an overarching framework for measuring gender transformative change.

The intended audience of these Guidelines includes gender experts and programme specialists seeking to design, implement, monitor and evaluate gender transformative interventions in food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture programmes and initiatives.

Learn more

Nourish Equality

Produced by Stronger Foundations for Nutrition, ‘Nourish Equality’ is a guide to grantmaking in pursuit of a more gender just and well nourished world. It unpacks the evidence base around the intersections of gender equality and nutrition, making the case for investment and highlighting gaps in guidance on how to take action. It also provides practical tools across the grant cycle to enable funders to mainstream gender in nutrition investments and to strengthen gender equality-focused grantmaking through better nutrition.

Learn more

Social media

This International Women's Day and beyond, amplify the messaging of our Gender and Nutrition toolkit using the suggested posts here below and our social media graphics.

Let’s close the #GenderNutritionGap together, we believe investing in nutrition, invests in women, follow our campaign through our channels here.

Download our social media assets

Tag us on your posts:

@SUN_Movement
@UN_Nutrition
@SUNCSN
@SUNBizNet
@womensday

Use these hashtags:

#InternationalWomensDay
#IWD2024
#InvestinNutrition
#InvestinWomen
#Nutrition4All

How you can take action

With the mounting pressures on food and nutrition security and rapidly approaching deadlines for the global nutrition targets, governments and their development and humanitarian partners – national and international – must take the lead in accelerating progress for adolescent girls’ and women’s nutrition (source: UNICEF).

Beyond the activities outlined above for International Women's Day, everyone can play a role and ensure a gender component of nutrition actions at the country level by:

Learning more about how actions and programmes towards better nutrition impact women, men, girls and boys differently;
Actively championing and taking part in a multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral approach to nutrition, ensuring efforts are targeted towards the most vulnerable
Promoting the appointment of women as SUN Government Focal Points – those high-level SUN Country government officials charged with coordinating multistakeholder nutrition actions in their countries.
Supporting SUN Countries to scale up gender-transformative actions in their national nutrition plans.
Encouraging leaders to commit through improved public investments and use of gender-responsive budgeting in programmes that address the underlying causes of poverty and inequality, as a crucial component in reducing hunger and malnutrition.
Advocating for intentional sex and gender-based analysis and address traditional norms and practices that hamper the achievement of gender equality and better nutrition for all.
Aligning efforts for accelerated global impact- such as joining the Anaemia Action Alliance, advancing strategies of the Global Accelerated Action for the Health of Adolescents, and implementation of the CFS Voluntary Guidelines on Gender Equality and Women’s and Girls.
Supporting women and girls having a voice at global, regional and national nutrition events.
Including adolescents – both girls and boys – in the design and implementation of policies and programmes at community and national level that address nutrition and related issues which impact nutritional status
Including gender- and nutrition-specific technical issues in our capacity-building initiatives.
Sharing gender/nutrition knowledge and good practices with SUN Movement stakeholders.
Surveying and measuring, annually through the SUN Movement Joint Annual Assessment, the impacts of malnutrition on women in SUN Countries.

Learn more here

Key messages

More than a billion adolescent girls and women suffer from undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies and anemia.

Undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies and anaemia amplify gender inequalities by lowering learning potential, wages and life opportunities for adolescent girls and women, weakening their immunity to infections, and increasing their risk of life-threatening complications during pregnancy and childbirth (source: UNICEF).
Nutrition continues to be one of the most cost-effective ways to improve health and development outcomes around the world. Yet according to UNICEF’s flagship report, Undernourished and Overlooked, millions of women and adolescent girls still struggle to access nutritious diets, essential nutrition, health, social services and resources needed to prevent malnutrition.

Reaching a world free from malnutrition in all its forms means taking a multi-sectoral systems approach to address gender inequality and malnutrition across the life-cycle.

Addressing the underlying causes of poverty and inequality is crucial in reducing hunger. This can involve investing in education, healthcare, and infrastructure, as well as promoting economic growth and reducing conflicts and political instability.

Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding have higher nutritional needs than other individuals, and may face additional barriers to accessing nutritious food and healthcare.
Doubling down on high-impact, cost-effective nutrition interventions, by scaling up Essential Nutrition Actions in MNCH services, antenatal care (ANC) and postnatal care platforms will have significant impacts on child survival and maternal health outcomes (source: Gender Nutrition Gap)
Adolescence is the second window of physical, emotional and cognitive growth; coinciding with changing agency and decision-making, including over life-style habits and food choices.
Eliminating anaemia, as well as addressing undernutrition and the growing challenges of obesity and overweight among adolescents, will not only save hundreds of thousands of lives, it can also increase economic productivity by up to 17 per cent (source: UNICEF).

Social assistance programmes, usually in the form of cash, food or voucher transfers, offer a crucial lifeline for adolescent girls and women in the poorest households and has been shown to improve women’s dietary diversity and their consumption of nutritious foods.
Agrifood systems are a more important source of livelihood for women than men, yet women engaged in agrifood systems tend to work in more dangerous and vulnerable jobs and often at lower levels of the value chain.

The global food crisis is deepening the nutrition crisis for adolescent girls and women.

Investing in agriculture, through empowering women in agrifood systems includes providing small-scale farmers with access to resources such as land, water, seeds, and training, as well as supporting research and development in agriculture. Additionally, advocating for food sovereignty underscores the importance of community control and regulation of local food systems. Integrating a gender-inclusive approach into food sovereignty creates more equitable communities and food systems for women and girls to thrive in.
Climate change risks exacerbating inequalities in nutrition, food security and gender equality: negatively impacting food systems, shifting disease burden and increasing climate induced migration. The combined impact of diminishing resources and limited decision-making power over allocation of increasingly scarce resources mean this crisis will deepen the systemic inequality that holds women and girls back from realizing their right to good nutrition. (source: Gender Transformative Nutrition Framework, A Nutrition Crisis in a Warming World)

The socio-economic benefits of investing in women’s and girls’ nutrition are far reaching, not only impacting their lives but also their families, communities and society for theirs and future generations to come.

Every dollar spent on scaling-up nutrition interventions for pregnant women and children yields $16 in returns.
It is estimated that for every US$ 1 invested in interventions aimed at reducing anaemia in women, such as iron and folic acid supplementation for non-pregnant and pregnant women, intermittent preventive treatment of malaria in pregnancy and fortification of cereals with iron, $12 in economic returns could be produced (source: WHO).

Nutrition services and social protection programmes are failing to meet the nutrition needs of adolescent girls and women, especially in humanitarian settings.

Paying attention to the nutritional needs of boys and men also is important. Action should be taken to ensure that boys and men are not only instrumental to empowering women and girls and helping achieve gender equality in nutrition, and it should be recognized that they also are affected by malnutrition and poverty and face specific vulnerabilities and limitations based on their gendered roles.

For more information

Visit our website