Africa's nutrition crisis is partly about money. It is just as much a public financial management problem. The most cost-effective nutrition interventions already exist and are well documented. The question is whether the financing system can deliver them at scale and on time, across several ministries at once, and account for the spending well enough to keep support coming.
Over 30 percent of children under five in Africa are stunted. The cost of leaving that unaddressed is large: malnutrition is estimated to cost the global economy around 5 percent of GDP a year, with cumulative losses that could reach US $41 trillion over the next decade. Yet many African countries still spend less than 2 percent of GDP on nutrition, and a healthy diet now costs about USD 4.41 per person per day, out of reach for roughly two-thirds of the continent.
Scaling up ten core nutrition interventions between now and 2035 could prevent 6.2 million child deaths, avert 980,000 stillbirths, cut 27 million cases of stunting, and spare 144 million women from anaemia in pregnancy. The interventions are known. What varies is whether budgets are set to fund them, spent so they reach people, and tracked well enough to know where the money went. Nutrition spending sits across health, agriculture, education and social protection, and it falls through the cracks of all of them when PFM systems do not join them up.
Priority areas where public financial management determines whether nutrition spending actually translates into better-fed children. Scroll across to explore each.
PFPR teams apply established diagnostic tools to the most pressing PFM-in-nutrition questions, working with governments to establish a baseline across cross-sectoral coordination, budget tagging, and execution of high-impact interventions.
Vanguard has hands-on experience here, from nutrition budget tagging guidelines to food fortification analysis, food-safety laboratories and the Rwanda Food Innovation Hub. PFPR draws on that to design reform actions with government and stay through implementation, rather than handing over a report and moving on.
Through the Africa School of Governance, PFPR develops curriculum modules on nutrition financing. They cover multi-sectoral coordination, expenditure tracking, and the practical side of fortification, supplementation and school feeding.
The aim is a group of African practitioners who understand both the detail of nutrition interventions and the PFM that decides whether budgets reach the household, the school and the clinic. They are the core of PFPR's in-country support, working alongside government teams.
Nutrition financing sits across several ministries and a scattered set of partners: SUN focal points, the World Bank's Global Financing Facility, UNICEF, WFP, FAO, agricultural development banks and civil society. Each one matters, and none is enough on its own.
PFPR brings these actors around one practical question: how nutrition money is budgeted, released and tracked across sectors. In each country it gets finance, health, agriculture and social protection counterparts working to a shared reform agenda. Across countries it connects reformers facing the same coordination problems so they can learn from each other.
Vanguard Economics created and launched PFPR in 2024–2025, and delivers it in partnership with the Africa School of Governance. The two provide the institutional base for PFPR's first phase.
