Scaling nutrition for human capital and jobs in MENAAP

Imagine three people. A child enters the classroom bearing the effects of chronic nutritional deprivation that will constrain how he learns, grows, and develops. Her mother starts the workday already exhausted, her anemia draining the energy and concentration she needs to stay productive and earn a living. Her father, still in the prime of his working life, is living with obesity and diet-related disease that increasingly pulls him away from work. Three people. Three manifestations of malnutrition in one family. Across the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan (MENAAP), different forms of malnutrition increasingly coexist, eroding human capital through learning lost, jobs foregone, rising health costs, and unrealized productivity. The good news is that we know much of what works to address malnutrition—and that many proven interventions are highly cost-effective. The harder part is delivering them consistently, at scale, and under tightening fiscal constraints. That challenge ran through discussions with government delegations from ten countries the MENAAP region at the WB–UNICEF Regional Nutrition Country Consultations in July 2026, in Amman, Jordan. Photo: The WB-UNICEF Regional Nutrition Country Consultations included government delegations from Djibouti, Egypt, Lebanon, Photo: Libya, Morocco, Oman, Syria, Tunisia, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen, as well as regional partners from ACF, ANECD, AUB, ECHO, FAO, FHI 360/Alive & Thrive, Harvard University, i-APS, IFC, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, KS Relief, SUN Movement, UNICEF, UNRWA, the University of South Carolina, the World Bank, and WFP Four constraints surfaced repeatedly—and, strikingly, the roadmaps that countries built over the Consultations looked a lot like the WBG’s Health Target Implementation Plan’s six scalable solutions to reach 1.5 billion people with quality, affordable health services by 2030. Nutrition financing is too often invisible, fragmented, and unpredictable Nutrition spending is scattered across health, agriculture, education, social protection, and other budgets. Governments therefore cannot always see where the money goes or whether it produces results. Dedicated allocations remain vulnerable to cuts, while external financing is frequently short-term, donor-driven, or concentrated on emergencies. Countries need costed priorites, visible and durable budget allocations, and public financial management systems that link spending to results. Together, these can protect nutrition investments, direct scarce resources toward what works, and reduce dependence on families’ ability to pay or short-lived project financing—in line with Solution 5 of the six presented scalable solutions from the WBG Health Target Implementation Plan (TIP Plan). Some countries favored dedicated nutrition budget lines; others prioritized embedding nutrition within durable sectoral budgets such as PHC, education, and social protection. More data do not automatically produce better decisions Nutrition indicators are not consistently integrated into routine health information systems. In many countries, data is outdated, fragmented across institutions, or unavailable. Countries need decision-ready nutrition data: integrated into routine and digital systems, disaggregated to reveal who is being missed, and linked to budgeting and program management, allowing for faster decisions, smarter targeting, and timely course correction. Those data must inform which nutrition interventions are included in essential health service packages and how they are adjusted as needs change (Solutions 1 and 3). Policies cannot deliver without an efficient delivery chain Shortages of trained staff, unclear operational guidance, weak referral pathways, and the uneven reach of primary health care, schools, community platforms, and social protection systems constrain quality and coverage. Nutrition must be embedded in the systems people already use. This means: equipping primary health-care facilities to provide quality nutrition services (Solution 1); upskilling and supporting frontline workers to deliver these services consistently (Solution 4), and extending service delivery to reach people where they are (Solution 2). Schools emerged repeatedly as particularly important for the MENAAP delegations as entry points to reach adolescents with nutrition education, healthy environments, supplementation, and early risk identification. Adopting a policy is not the same as implementing it Many countries have or plan to put in place policies on food fortification, labelling, marketing, school food environments, and healthy diets. Yet limited inspection, laboratory, quality-control, enforcement, and compliance capacity weakens their impact. A credible regulatory architecture protects consumers while creating predictable rules and a level playing field for business. This is a prerequisite to private investment to enable producing, marketing, and distributing healthier foods. This is where public policy and private investment can reinforce each other, and where Solution 6 intersects directly with AgriConnect, with an approach that goes beyond the health sector. Investments in fortification, healthier food environments, resilient supply chains, and more productive agrifood systems can improve diets while strengthening firms, markets, and employment. The investments IFC spotlighted at the event—$166 million in fortified food staples and $1.2 billion in nutritious foods between FY20 and FY24—illustrated the potential role of private capital. Across the WBG, financing, advisory services, performance-based approaches, IFC investment, and MIGA-backed guarantees provide complementary instruments for advancing this agenda. Jobs were not the focus of the Country Consultations, yet they surfaced throughout. Nutrition is a jobs issue twice over: Stronger nutrition systems create jobs today across health services, food production, laboratories, manufacturing, logistics, and community delivery; at the same time, children who are adequately nourished are better positioned to learn and earn, while preventing anemia and obesity protects the productivity of people already in the workforce. The WBG now has an opportunity to help translate the MENAAP roadmaps into concrete actions. The Health Target Implementation Plan, National Health Compacts, the Jobs agenda, IFC Nutrition in Agribusiness strategy, and the AgriConnect Implementation Plan converge on many of the same priorities identified by countries. The architecture exists. The priority actions are there. Now comes the hard part: sustained implementation that delivers results for people, economies, and the region’s future.