Incentivizing Nutrition

Abstract

Investing in nutrition will contribute to achieving the World Bank’s dual goals of ending extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity. The coordinated support of the international community is important to optimizing the rising trend in nutrition investment, which was galvanized by the global Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement, and reaffirmed at the 2012 World Health Assembly where world leaders committed to reaching six global nutrition targets by 2025. The report, Incentive Mechanisms to Accelerate Improved Nutrition Outcomes—and the accompanyingPractitioner’s Compendium—provide important guidance for cost-effective multisectoral efforts to scale up nutrition programming by incentivizing nutrition interventions. Financial incentivesare one tool to support nutrition interventions. However, incentives need to be carefully chosen, underpinned by a clear theory of change, and designed for particular contexts and objectives.When a decision is taken to use financial incentives, the report and compendium offer operational guidance to task teams and leaders. They highlight the potential challenges and strengths of the various mechanisms, and include country examples and nutrition indicators to monitor progress at the levels where the mechanism would exert its influence, i.e., national, sub-national,facility, community, households, or individuals. It is intended for non-technical staff to support their clients’ effortsto enhance the nutritional impact of World Bank country investments. The report providespractical advice to design and implement nutrition interventions in future operations based on review of past successful and less successful attempts. The recommendations are organized bytype of financial incentive mechanism, which correspond to the specific levels where the mechanismsexert their influence, i.e., national, sub-national, facility, community, households, or individuals, and also provides information on the use of non-financial incentives.