Africa's nutrition crisis is partly a financing crisis. It is also, fundamentally, a public financial management crisis. Many of the most cost-effective nutrition interventions exist, are well documented, and have the evidence base behind them. The question is whether the financing system can deliver them at scale, on time, across multiple ministries, and in a way that is auditable enough to attract sustained support.
Over 30 percent of children under five in Africa are stunted. The cost of inaction is staggering: failure to address the malnutrition burden risks costing the global economy around 5 percent of GDP each year, with cumulative losses that could reach US $41 trillion over the next decade. Yet many African countries still allocate less than 2 percent of GDP to nutrition improvement, and the average cost of a healthy diet has risen to USD 4.41 per person per day — putting it out of reach for roughly two-thirds of the continent's population.
Scaling up ten core nutrition interventions between now and 2035 could prevent 6.2 million child deaths, avert 980,000 stillbirths, reduce 27 million cases of stunting, and spare 144 million women from anaemia during pregnancy. The interventions are known. What is uneven is whether budgets are formulated to fund them, executed to reach them, and tracked well enough to know where the money actually went. Nutrition spending sits across health, agriculture, education and social protection — and falls through the cracks of every one of them when PFM systems do not stitch them together.
Seven 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.
Drawing on Vanguard's hands-on experience with nutrition budget tagging guidelines, food fortification landscape analysis, food-safety laboratory operations and the Rwanda Food Innovation Hub, PFPR co-creates reform actions with country counterparts and accompanies them through implementation rather than handing over a report and moving on.
Through the Africa School of Governance, PFPR develops dedicated curriculum modules on nutrition financing — covering multi-sectoral coordination, expenditure tracking, and the practical realities of fortification, supplementation and school feeding programmes.
The goal is a cohort of African practitioners fluent in both the technical detail of nutrition interventions and the PFM mechanics that determine whether budgets reach the household, the school, and the clinic. These practitioners form the backbone of PFPR's in-country support, deployed alongside government teams.
Nutrition financing sits across multiple ministries and is influenced by a fragmented set of partners — SUN focal points, the World Bank's Global Financing Facility, UNICEF, WFP, FAO, agricultural development banks, and civil society advocates. Each is critical; none alone is sufficient.
PFPR connects these actors around the practical question of how nutrition money is budgeted, released and tracked across sectors. At the country level it convenes finance, health, agriculture and social protection counterparts around a shared reform agenda; across countries it enables South–South exchange among reformers facing the same multi-sectoral coordination challenges.
PFPR was conceived, designed and launched by Vanguard Economics in 2024–2025, and is delivered in partnership with the Africa School of Governance. Together they provide the institutional foundation for PFPR's first phase.
