Nigeria’s persistent child malnutrition crisis has come under renewed scrutiny, with the Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership demanding stronger accountability mechanisms, performance-based financing and legislative oversight to bridge the widening gap between government nutrition commitments and actual results.
The centre said on Wednesday that stunting among children under five in Nigeria stood at 40 per cent, significantly above the expired national target of 18 per cent, highlighting what it described as a failure to translate policies, budgetary allocations and funding commitments into measurable improvements in child nutrition.
Speaking at a policy webinar in Abuja, the Director of the Olikoye Ransome-Kuti Institute for Health and Social Equity, Dr Danjuma Iyaji, said Nigeria had developed systems for measuring nutrition outcomes but lacked effective mechanisms to hold public officials accountable for persistent poor performance.
“Nigeria has built the measurement architecture of nutrition accountability without building its consequence architecture,” Iyaji said.
The webinar, organised by the Athena Centre through its institute, was titled From Measurement to Consequence: Fixing Nigeria’s Nutrition Accountability Gap. It examined findings from the centre’s policy paper, Political Incentives and Nutrition Neglect: Why State Governments Fail to Improve Child Nutrition.
The event brought together representatives of the Office of the Vice President, the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) and the House of Representatives Committee on Nutrition and Food Security to examine why government commitments were not consistently translating into improved nutrition outcomes.
According to the centre, only nine of Nigeria’s 36 states had formally established State Councils on Nutrition as of April 2026. It noted, however, that the establishment of such councils did not necessarily mean they were functional or delivering results.
To address the shortcomings, the centre proposed linking supplementary funding tranches to independently verified institutional readiness, conducting annual state performance assessments, establishing an escalation framework for persistent non-performance and introducing annual legislative hearings on nutrition at the state level.
Participants, however, cautioned that accountability measures must not deny vulnerable children access to essential nutrition services because their state governments failed to meet administrative or performance requirements.
Presidential Aide Identifies Breaks in Accountability Chain
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Nutrition and Public Health, Uju Rochas-Anwukah, endorsed the centre’s diagnosis, identifying three major gaps in the nutrition accountability chain: government commitments failing to translate into fund releases, released funds failing to produce effective service delivery, and inadequate understanding of nutrition priorities among subnational leaders.
“A stunted child is a lost asset that no bridge can build,” she said.
Rochas-Anwukah warned that readiness-based financing could disadvantage states with the greatest nutrition needs but weaker implementation capacity.
She called for a clear pathway through which less-prepared states could strengthen their institutional capacity and qualify for funding without leaving vulnerable children behind.
The presidential aide also clarified that the terms governing the Child Nutrition Fund were determined by UNICEF and its partners, rather than her office.
She further urged the passage of the proposed National Food and Nutrition Bill, arguing that a stronger legal framework would help institutionalise accountability and sustain nutrition interventions beyond individual administrations.
NPHCDA Seeks Facility-Level Monitoring
The Director of Nutrition at the NPHCDA, Dr Adebiyi Olatunde, said nutrition accountability must extend beyond state-level indicators to primary healthcare facilities, where the availability of therapeutic foods and micronutrients directly determines children’s access to treatment and preventive services.
She warned that aggregate state statistics could conceal serious deficiencies affecting particular communities, wards and health facilities.
“At times we have data for a state, and the issue may be in only two particular wards,” Olatunde said.
She advocated disaggregating nutrition data to ward and facility levels to identify localised failures and ensure interventions reached the children who needed them most.
Olatunde also called for root-cause assessments before sanctions or other escalation measures were imposed, stressing the need to establish whether poor performance resulted from inadequate funding, supply-chain disruptions or weaknesses in programme implementation.
Her position reinforced the argument that accountability should be evidence-based, with corrective measures tailored to the specific causes of failure rather than relying solely on state-wide performance indicators.
Lawmakers Propose 70:30 Nutrition Funding Model
The Research Lead for the House of Representatives Committee on Nutrition and Food Security, Abel Okechukwu, described conditional financing as “workable and urgently needed”, but maintained that the approach must protect essential nutrition services while rewarding improved performance.
He proposed allocating 70 per cent of nutrition funding as a protected lifeline for essential interventions, including micronutrient provision and school feeding, while reserving the remaining 30 per cent as a performance incentive tied to functional nutrition councils, approved costed plans and published expenditure records.
“Conditional financing should not punish the child,” Okechukwu said.
He also called for stronger legislative scrutiny of nutrition spending, arguing that oversight hearings must be supported by reliable data and adequate preparation rather than becoming ceremonial exercises.
According to him, effective hearings require standardised reporting templates and the submission of relevant reports at least 21 days before proceedings.
Okechukwu said the House committee intended to intensify joint oversight activities in 2026 and 2027. He also proposed inserting a provision in the Appropriation Act to link federal grants to evidence that state governments had exercised appropriate oversight of their nutrition programmes.
The proposed funding model seeks to balance two competing priorities: protecting children from disruptions to essential services and creating financial incentives for state governments to improve institutional performance.
Athena Centre Plans Governors’ Forum, State Assembly Engagements
The discussions further highlighted the need to protect essential nutrition funding, provide weaker states with a pathway to meeting readiness requirements, assess performance below the state level and make root-cause investigations the starting point for addressing persistent implementation failures.
However, the centre acknowledged that whether existing Child Nutrition Fund arrangements permit the proposed financing conditions remained unresolved.
As part of its follow-up strategy, the Athena Centre said it would engage partners in the Child Nutrition Fund on financing conditions, present its proposed escalation framework to the Nigeria Governors’ Forum and submit its legislative recommendations to State Houses of Assembly.
It also plans to circulate a policy note incorporating recommendations from the webinar panellists before publication and reassess the four proposed reforms in July 2027.
In her closing remarks, the webinar moderator and researcher at the institute, Ijeoma Achebe, said the discussions had strengthened the policy paper’s assessment of the institutional and political factors undermining nutrition outcomes.
“The gap is not simply about a lack of policies,” she said. “It is the distance between commitments and delivery.”
The centre’s intervention places renewed emphasis on the need to move Nigeria’s nutrition agenda beyond policy formulation and data collection to effective implementation, transparent spending and enforceable accountability.
With under-five stunting reported at 40 per cent against an expired national target of 18 per cent, the challenge facing governments at all levels is to ensure that nutrition commitments translate into adequately funded programmes, functioning health services and measurable improvements in children’s health and development.
