The Global Nutrition Report 2015: Actions and accountability to advance nutrition and sustainable development, has as a key theme the notion of tracking progress on tackling undernutrition as an important factor in holding donors, governments and other institutions to account. The data in the report itself plays a role in monitoring progress. At present, data allowing the monitoring of impact and reach of nutrition-specific interventions is limited. Lack of consensus on data, metrics and methods make monitoring difficult to undertake, analyse and compare, although improvements are being seen in actions to track nutrition.

Approaches to tackling undernutrition need to be multi-sectoral, which makes tracking both nutrition spending and progress towards targets difficult. As the Global Nutrition Report 2015 states, countries make progress when actions from multiple levels converge and reinforce each other in a virtuous circle. Nutrition-sensitive approaches, which seek to both reach a direct nutrition goal as well…