Briefing Paper

Nutrition Policies in Developing Countries: Challenges and Highlights

Malnutrition remains one of the major obstacles to human well-being and economic prosperity in developing countries.There are strong normative and instrumental reasons related to human and economic development to address the burden of malnutrition as an issue of public concern. This calls for governments to prioritize policies and actions and allocate substantial investments in efforts to address the needs of their malnourished populations. In this policy note, we review developing countries’
nutrition policies at the national level. We first define the area of nutrition in the sector-aligned landscape of
national policies. We then discuss the challenges to address malnutrition in national policy processes and turn
to examples of countries that have successfully included nutrition in their development agenda. We conclude by
outlining the rationale for making malnutrition reduction a policy priority, and providing some policy recommendations
for the realization of this objective.