This year, a key focus of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Nutrition for Development is to ensure sufficient Parliamentary attention is given to the Nutrition for Growth (N4G) Summit in Paris in 2025.
N4G is a global pledging moment to drive greater action towards ending malnutrition. It aims to answer the questions of how to tackle malnutrition, and who pays for it, by:
- bringing together national and regional governments, international organisations, philanthropies, businesses, and NGOs;
- encouraging ambitious political and financial commitments; and
- elevating nutrition on the development agenda.
The UK pioneered N4G, hosting a Hunger Summit under the spotlight of the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games, and hosting the first N4G in London in 2013. Following the London summit, N4Gs have been broadly organised every four years, usually by the host country of the Olympic and Paralympic games. This includes Milan in 2017 and Tokyo in 2021. The next N4G Summit will take place in March in Paris, and aims to:
- put nutrition at the centre of the sustainable development agenda;
- make the fight against all forms of malnutrition a universal cause (this includes obesity);
- create continuity between N4G summits and commitments to good nutrition; and
- maintain a high level of political and financial engagement in nutrition.
N4G Paris is particularly significant because it:
- represents five years in which to achieve the SDGs in 2030;
- marks the end of the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition;
- marks the renewal of the World Health Assembly nutrition targets;
- marks the second UN Food Systems Summit stocktake; and
- creates momentum to place nutrition on the agenda at the World Bank Spring and Autumn meetings, United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), G7, G20, and World Health Assembly.
In December, the APPG on Nutrition for Development, together the APPG on the UN Global Goals, met with the Special Envoy for N4G, Brieuc Pont, to provide an opportunity for UK Parliamentarians to be briefed by the Special Envoy on the overarching objectives of the Paris N4G, and to discuss how UK Parliamentarians can best contribute to a successful summit.
The APPG’s Co-Chairs, David Mundell MP and Steve Race MP, Vice-Chair, Monica Harding MP, and Member, Alice Macdonald MP, were joined by fellow Member, Lord McConnell, who is also Co-Chair of the APPG on the UN Global Goals, and representatives from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Lord Oates, Chief Executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger (UAMH), which provides the Secretariat for the APPG, also joined the meeting.