Less for those with least: the implications of UK Aid cuts on child malnutrition
On Wednesday 25 November 2020, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a cut in funding to overseas aid, from 0.7% to 0.5% of Britain’s gross national income, slicing more than £4bn from the 2021’s ODA budget.
Charities foresee that the budget cut could result in nearly three million women and children going without life-saving nutrition and 5.6 million children left unvaccinated, causing up to 100,000 deaths.
In this webinar, we will discuss the implications of these cuts on SDG2, our ability to fund cutting-edge research and indeed, the wider ability to forge collective action to end child malnutrition.
THE SPEAKERS
Chair: Prof Claire Heffernan, Principal Investigator of the UKRI GCRF Action Against Stunting Hub and LIDC Director
Saskia Osendarp – Executive Director, Micronutrient Forum
Saskia holds an MSc and PhD in Nutrition from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands. Since winning the Young Investigator Award in the late 1990s from the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, she has earned an impressive record of academic, public health and private sector research and innovation achievements.
She has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications, scientific publications and book chapters, and has led cross-functional research teams on innovative products through public-private partnerships. Most recently, she led the NWGN, a multi-sectoral working group based in the Netherlands, to promote nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive approaches in evidence-informed development policies and strategies. In addition, Saskia is Visiting Associate Professor Nutrition and Health in Low- and Middle-Income Countries at Wageningen University. Twitter: @OsendpNutrition – @MNForum
Kate Munro – Advocacy Manager, Action Against Hunger UK
Kate is Head of Advocacy at Action Against Hunger UK. She has worked in the international NGO sector for over a decade, supporting organisations to develop and implement advocacy campaigns on climate change, sustainable development, conflict and hunger, and malnutrition. At Action Against Hunger, her advocacy is focused on ensuring reducing malnutrition is a development and humanitarian priority, and breaking the cycle between hunger and conflict. She has also recently lead on establishing Action Against Hunger’s first programmes in the UK. Twitter: @ACF_UK
Ben Deighton – Managing Editor, SciDev.Net
Ben is the Managing Editor of SciDev.Net, the world’s biggest news service covering science in a development context. Ben is responsible for overseeing SciDev.Net content, ensuring its editorial independence and the quality of articles and multimedia products. Ben joined SciDev.Net in July 2017 after four years as editor of Horizon magazine. Ben has worked as a journalist since 2001 and was previously a reporter for the Reuters news agency in London and Brussels. Twitter: @ben_deighton – @SciDevNet
Event details
When: 10 December, 2020 - 2:00 pm