Executive Summary
Malnutrition in all its forms - undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies and increasing overweight and obesity fuelling the rise of non-communicable disease (NCDs) – has become a significant African challenge. This triple burden is the greatest threat facing the continent’s development trajectory as the current and next generation
of Africans are deprived of reaching their full human development potential. African Leaders have begun to respond.

Africa is unlikely to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), partly due to the pervasive effects of hunger and malnutrition. As indicated by the Global Nutrition Report (2017) and the AUDA-NEPAD Africa Nutrition Scorecard (2015), a more intentional focus on nutrition can have a powerful multiplier effect across the SDGs, such as: 1) promoting sustainable food production, 2) increasing socio-economic development 3) decreasing the burden on health systems, 4) fostering equity and inclusion since nutrition acts as a platform for better outcomes in education, employment, female empowerment and poverty reduction, and 5) promoting stability, ensuring peace and security.

The rollout of Agenda 2063 stipulates the bold vision to completely eliminate hunger and food insecurity. However, current interventions are often implemented in isolation and are thus not working well. A new focus is required to address malnutrition in all its complexity, which requires an array of actions, taking different forms in different countries. 

Three things need to change. First, the political environment should be made conducive to reducing malnutrition. Second, malnutrition cannot be addressed in isolation; policies and practices in the many sectors that intersect with nutrition – from education to agriculture to climate and the environment – should address it. Finally, high-impact, targeted nutrition interventions must reach the people that need them. At present the gap between delivery and need are large. 

The AUDA-NEPAD Nutrition and Food Systems Implementation Plan aims to catalyse and support this agenda and enable Member States to address malnutrition more effectively. This explicitly builds on a multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder approach involving an array of actions by several sectors in different forms in different
countries. This implementation plan proposes a way to address these challenges. With this implementation plan, AUDA-NEPAD’s vision is to reduce hunger and malnutrition by 25 percent by 2025. The mission of the AUDA-NEPAD Nutrition and Food Systems Strategic Programme is to catalyse food and nutrition security
actions for greater impact on the African continent. 

These align to the new AUDA mandate as well as the broader AUDA-NEPAD vision and mission. The AUDANEPAD mandate is to;

• Coordinate and execute priority regional and continental projects to promote regional integration towards accelerated realization of Agenda 2063
• Strengthen capacity of African Union Member States and regional bodies
• Advance knowledge based advisory support
• Undertake the full range of resource mobilization
• Serve as the continent’s technical interface with all of Africa’s development stakeholders and development partners.

AUDA-NEPAD’s vision is to build an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global arena. Its mission is to work with African countries, both individually and collectively towards sustainable growth and development.

In line with the AUDA-NEPAD Nutrition and Food Systems Strategic Programme vision and mission, the following overarching goals have been identified:

1. To be a strategic programme for the AUDA-NEPAD Agency to foster alignment and harmonisation of agriculture, food systems and nutrition programmes in Africa at different levels towards achieving the Africa food security and nutrition vision, goals and targets.
2. To use agriculture as an entry point to promote coordination, complementarity and synergies, between and across the different initiatives that seek to address the burden of malnutrition in Africa.
3. To promote development of human resource, research capacity and evidence to support nutrition actions at national and AU level.

In order to achieve these goals, AUDA-NEPAD commits to adopting a multisectoral and food systems approach by:

• Accelerating agriculture impact on nutrition through increased dietary diversity and related improvements in nutrient adequacy and quality of diets. 
• Promoting maternal and young child nutrition through advocacy of essential nutrition interventions. These and include AUDA-NEPAD’s support to Scaling up Nutrition action on the continent and, including expanding work on the Cost of Hunger and Cost of Interventions to all African countries.
• Supporting better school feeding programmes promoted as a social protection mechanism through programmes that support the production and market creation for smallholder farmers.
• Developing nutrition and food systems professional capacity for planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of nutrition action on the African continent promoted.
• Generating and sharing strategic knowledge including management lessons on best practices to support nutrition progress in Africa.

AUDA-NEPAD will focus implementation on high impact actions across health, nutrition, agriculture, water and sanitation, through the facilitation and promotion of a number of nutrition flagship areas; These are to:

1. Promote improved maternal and young child nutrition through essential actions
2. Promote food fortification, Biofortification and supplementation to prevent and reduce micronutrient deficiencies
3. Promote dietary diversity (adopting a better value chain approach from farm to plate)
4. Promote home grown school feeding programmes and go to scale
5. Promote food safety, regulatory and quality management frameworks
6. Promote better governance of food environments to address overweight and obesity
7. Promote initiatives to address the interlinkages between communicable diseases, NCDs, maternal and child health, and socio-economic development.

Given AUDA-NEPAD’s commitment to learning, the document will have the flexibility to evolve as needed based on the growing body of research that documents the impact and cost-effectiveness of food security and nutrition interventions.

The role of AUDA-NEPAD: To achieve these objectives, the unique role of AUDA-NEPAD can be defined and recognized as:
Galvanising African leaders to respond to malnutrition through such initiatives such as the African Leaders for Nutrition (ALN), and the Pan African Parliamentary Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (PAPA-FSN) .

• Convening stakeholders from across all sectors in the food system at various scales to promote a multisectoral approach to address malnutrition and to build political will and commitment.
• Creating a conducive enabling environment through supporting the establishment of coordination mechanisms, as well as the alignment and policy coherence.
• Advocating for nutrition in appropriate fora with a particular emphasis on changing the “political currency” of nutrition across the continent.
• Building the surveillance of nutrition, particularly to support on-going learning and adaptation of policies and programmes through garnering evidence and analysis and communicating findings.
• Providing technical backstopping particularly for ensuring policies and programmes become nutritionsensitive and are fully implemented
• Galvanising community and grassroots engagement to drive demand for nutrition. 
• Promoting accountability and reporting to underpin a “social compact” on nutrition between states and citizens across the continent.
• Strengthening capacity in the range of activities required to implement this agenda.
• In all of this, adopting a system approach that ensures sustainable diets with co-benefits on climate, nutrition, human capital, the environment plus overall economic development.