Nutrition challenges: Nigeria committed to grassroots solutions – Shettima

Vice President Kashim Shettima has reaffirmed Nigeria’s commitment to addressing its nutrition challenges through a community-driven strategy aimed at transforming nutrition outcomes across the 774 local government areas of the country.

This is just as the World Bank has lauded the N-774 Initiative’s strategic framework as a potential model for tackling malnutrition in the country and across the region.

Speaking during a meeting with a high-level delegation from the World Bank Group at the Presidential Villa Abuja on Tuesday, Shettima presented the N-774 Initiative, which builds on successful outcomes from the Accelerating Nutrition Results in Nigeria (ANRiN) project.

The vice president, while acknowledging the support of the World Bank on numerous nutrition programmes across Nigeria, noted that the N-774 Initiative comes at a crucial time considering the ANRiN project closeout.

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“Malnutrition is a Nigerian problem that needs a Nigerian solution and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is very much willing to support such an initiative,” he said, adding that the project integrates nutrition goals across education, agriculture, health and social protection sectors.

The World Bank delegation, including the Country Director, Regional Director for West and Central Africa and the Practice Manager for Health Global Practice, expressed a strong commitment to the initiative’s bottom-up approach to addressing nutrition challenges.

Specifically, the Country Director of the World Bank, Ndiame Diop, thanked the vice president for his leadership in coordinating multi-stakeholder collaboration in setting agenda on nutrition issues in public discourses.

He added that it is important to see Nigeria’s government’s ongoing financing for nutrition, just as he announced that the bank has earmarked $50 million under ANRiN 2.0 programme which is a crisis-response window.