GENEVA – Although the past decade has seen progress in the fight against malnutrition, 148 million children remain stunted, 45 million suffer from wasting, and anaemia affects nearly one in three women globally, according to experts at the Geneva Health Forum (GHF).

In 2023 alone, 733 million people experienced hunger—152 million more than in 2019—and over 2.8 billion people were unable to afford a healthy diet. The GHF noted that malnutrition also remains a contributing factor in 45% of deaths among children under five.

Looking ahead, the global nutrition crisis could worsen.

Francesco Branca of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva warned that the number of obese people worldwide is expected to rise from a billion today to 2.3 billion by 2050.

“Nutrition has to be where we take action,” he told a room on Tuesday at Campus Biotech, where this year’s GHF side sessions of the 78th World Health Assembly are being held.

“Where do we take action?” Branca asked. “It has to be people-centered. So the action has to be where the problem is. The action has to be in the centres where children are presented with malnutrition. The action has to be taken in primary health care offices where doctors find people with obesity. The action has to be where people are suffering from a lack of food, indeed, and that’s, of course, the responsibility of people providing services and people who are making decisions about those services.”

The three-hour session brought together global experts from diverse sectors. It was held against the backdrop of a recent decision by WHO member states to extend the Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016-2025) to 2030, aligning it with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It also took place following the 2025 Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit in March, where 47 participating states made more than 400 commitments.

Speakers highlighted the need for stronger governance and integrated, multisectoral approaches to combat malnutrition. They emphasised bundling services to improve efficiency, implementing regulatory measures such as taxation and food labelling, and exploring innovative financing mechanisms.

According to Valerie Bellino, president of the Geneva Global Health Cooperative, the session’s aim was also to position Geneva as a driving force in promoting global nutrition solutions and to help build the long-term momentum needed to meet the 2030 targets.

A ‘village’ of solutions

Afshan Khan, Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Coordinator of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, spoke passionately about the importance of the N4G Summit. She highlighted the strong participation of civil society in the summit, describing it as “a whole village of solutions.”

Khan emphasised that the event featured a whole day dedicated to showcasing best practices from civil society partners and youth-led discussions about how the intersection of nutrition, health, climate change, and conflict is shaping their lives, now and in the future.

She added that there was also a dedicated day of engagement with the private sector.

“We have to be able to address all forms of malnutrition and undernutrition with the right kinds of quality nutritious foods available at an affordable price, as well as having foods that are low in trans fat or sugars,” Khan explained. “A really important component is how we influence what people eat, which is influenced by what companies are putting out there on the market.”

She reiterated that nutrition is not just a health concern, but a key pillar of economic development.

“The Nutrition for Growth Summit helped connect the golden thread of the importance of nutrition for long-term growth and development of children, for the health of women… and also the economic imperative nutrition brings to building human capital,” she said.

“There is a real opportunity to emphasise and stress more that an investment in nutrition has a $23 rate of return for each dollar,” Khan added, citing World Bank estimates. “Here we see an opportunity to show the power of nutrition and its ability to transform societies.”

Still, while some countries have stepped up, others are pulling back—and the consequences are already unfolding.

Khan also warned that ongoing conflicts, climate stress, and budget cuts are combining to put millions of lives at risk.

“The situation in Gaza is perhaps one of the most visible and stark, because it’s clearly a man-made crisis—as is Sudan, as is Yemen,” she said.

She explained that nutrition programs are often amongst the first to be cut when aid is reduced. For example, more than 600,000 people in Kenya living in drought-stricken areas are expected to lose access to lifesaving food and nutrition services. Similar cuts are taking place in Sudan.

According to the Standing Together for Nutrition consortium, a 44% reduction in aid could erase decades of hard-won progress, leaving 2.3 million children without access to essential treatment.

Khan warned that as many as 60% of these children may not survive without intervention: “The long-term projections on death due to some of these cuts are stark.”

Learning from success

A panel discussion during the session highlighted where nutrition efforts yield results, offering practical takeaways that others in the field could adapt to their national contexts.

Azucena Milana-Dayanghirang, Assistant Secretary and executive director of the National Nutrition Council in the Philippines, shared that her country faces a triple burden of malnutrition: undernutrition, overnutrition, and micronutrient deficiencies. To address this, the government launched a multisectoral platform centred on what she called “ABCDY,” where A stands for academia, B for businesses, C for civil society, D for donors, and Y for youth.

She explained that these nutrition-focused collaborations are being implemented at all levels, from the federal government to local government units.

“What is unique about the Philippines is that we have 7,000 islands—geographically isolated areas where malnutrition is highest,” Milana-Dayanghirang explained.

To tackle these challenges, the government rolled out the Philippine Plan of Action for Nutrition (PPAN), a six-year strategy from 2023 to 2028. The plan focusses on three core pillars: promoting healthier diets, fostering improved social behaviours, and strengthening governance.

“We develop policies,” Milana-Dayanghirang said. She pointed to one example: the Philippines instituted a sugar-sweetened beverage tax that has effectively reduced consumption, especially amongst teenagers and children.

She added that the country is now in the final stages of approving a national nutrient profiling model and food labelling program—tools she hopes will further strengthen the country’s nutrition agenda.

In an Africa case study, Moumouni Kinda, director of the Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA), shared that globally the treatment of children for malnutrition has expanded significantly, from treating no children for malnutrition 55 years ago to nearly nine million in 2023. Last year, Alima teams treated 350,000 malnourished children in 13 countries.

However, despite this progress, Kinda said his teams receive weekly reports from more than a dozen countries warning of imminent food shortages. Amongst the hardest-hit nations are Niger, Chad, host to many Sudanese refugees, and Nigeria.

“The violent shutdown of USAID and funding cuts in the United Kingdom and Europe are worsening an already critical situation,” Kinda warned. “But we have hope.”

He explained that that hope lies in the potential to secure more sustainable, local sources of funding. Like the Philippines, Kinda suggested that more African countries could implement a sugar-sweetened beverage tax to help finance nutrition programs.

He emphasised that the tax could be modest—”only one cent”—but if adopted by several countries, it could have a significant impact.

“If we approach 10 countries, this could be about $1.4 billion annually,” Kinda said, noting that such a sum could help treat millions of children across the continent.

The WHO’s Lina Mahy highlighted significant funding imbalances in the global food system. She pointed out that during the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020 to 2022, the food industry made approximately $1 billion in profit every two days. In that same period, 62 new food billionaires emerged.

“We have to put that into perspective,” Mahy said. “We need to talk about – these power imbalances and inequalities and how to address them. WHO is ready to talk about these elephants in the room.”

Investing in food systems

The Aga Khan Foundation is working to help fill funding and service gaps in the global nutrition space. Claudia Hudspet, the organisation’s global health lead, said the foundation has committed more than $45 million over the next five years to better integrate nutrition into healthcare systems and improve access to affordable, healthy food.

One of the foundation’s key programs is the Central Asia Stunting Initiative (CASI), which targets high stunting rates in remote parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. The program is designed to improve maternal and child health outcomes by supporting frontline health workers in assessing and addressing nutritional needs.

In partnership with the Aga Khan Health Service and local partners in Pakistan, the foundation helped develop a mobile application for Lady Health Visitors (LHVs) in the Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral regions. The app enables LHVs (health workers that specialise in maternal and child health) to assess the nutritional status of pregnant women, mothers, and children during household visits and provide targeted nutrition supplements when needed.

“The Central Asia Stunting Initiative really looks at integration into health systems,” Hudspet explained. She said a major focus is increasing the number of women giving birth in health facilities and ensuring that newborns are weighed at delivery. “It’s a very simple intervention, but many babies aren’t weighed at birth, and we miss a lot of those low birth weight and small for gestational age babies, and we’re not able to give them the best start in life,” she said. “Identifying growth faltering and catching children before they lose weight or stature… improves our chances of success.”

In addition to stunting prevention, the foundation is working to integrate nutrition into early childhood development efforts through the Nurturing Care Framework.

Hudspet also emphasised the foundation’s growing interest in food systems, particularly the links between agriculture, climate resilience, and nutrition.

One of its flagship programs in this area is the Indian Ocean Coastal Regeneration Initiative (IOCRI), which Hudspet described as supporting sustainable livelihoods in coastal communities while restoring degraded ecosystems. The program aims to rehabilitate 100,000 hectares of coastal lands and strengthen local economies through renewable energy and nature-based solutions.

“While this is a climate initiative, initially, we also are integrating nutrition through things like blue foods; aquaculture nutrition champions looking at food supply and social behaviour,” Hudspet said.

Because the foundation and Aga Khan University are part of the same network, the foundation can also leverage data to monitor program impact and adapt as needed.

“We monitor these programs very intensively, and tweak and learn from them,” she said.

Nutrition as a climate health strategy

Nancy Aburto, Deputy Director of the Food and Nutrition Division at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said the growing body of data around food insecurity and its consequences offers new opportunities to move from talk to action.

“I’m going to start with a statistic that’s not very pretty,” she told the room. “It’s 2.8 billion people worldwide [who] cannot afford a healthy diet.”

But Aburto said that knowing this figure—and having tracked it for several years—has pushed researchers and policymakers to seek tangible solutions. One of the clearest, she said, lies in how we spend existing agricultural support.

“In 2022, the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report documented that worldwide support for food and agriculture was almost $630 billion a year,” she said.

When combined with recent true cost accounting from FAO that shows unhealthy diets account for about 70% of the $10 trillion in hidden costs to health systems, the case for repurposing that investment becomes even stronger.

“It tells us that we can repurpose that $630 billion a year to something that can help us reduce that $10 trillion cost burden on our health systems,” Aburto explained. “And that is moving us towards solutions for repurposing agricultural investments to diverse, nutritious foods, which can absolutely be monumental.”

She added that food systems reform has benefits beyond nutrition.

According to Aburto, shifting diets could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the food and agriculture sector by up to 13%. The environmental benefit doesn’t stop there—healthier diets can also help protect forests, water systems, and biodiversity.

“This means enabling healthy diets is not just a solution for the nutrition community,” she said. “It’s a solution for the environmental community as well.”

Image Credits: Agha Khan Foundation/University of Central Asia / Azamat Azarov, Maayan Hoffman, Ismail Taxta/ WHO, WMO.