PAKISTAN’S nutrition crisis is not short of diagnosis. What it lacks is the machinery and political discipline to act on what is known. That was the most useful message to emerge from DawnMedia’s two-day Act for Nutrition conference in Islamabad, where experts argued that malnutrition cannot be confined to the health sector. Over four in 10 children under five are stunted, while the economic cost of malnutrition is estimated at $17bn annually. Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal’s promise that the Planning Commission will take ownership of nutrition and early childhood development is therefore significant. It recognises that this is a human-capital and development crisis involving health, agriculture, education, water, sanitation, population policy and social protection.
Speakers also stressed that 30pc to 40pc of stunting occurs before birth, making maternal nutrition, antenatal care, birth spacing and the first 1,000 days of life critical. Adolescence, too, cannot remain the forgotten interval between childhood and motherhood. Equally important was the emphasis on water and sanitation. Feeding a child better will achieve little if contaminated water and repeated infection undermine growth. Calls for targeted WASH investment in high-burden districts should be taken seriously. The problem is that Pakistan has heard much of this before. Policies exist, programmes operate and donor money flows, yet nutrition remains fragmented among institutions that rarely plan, finance or deliver together. The Benazir Nashonuma Programme shows that progress is possible. Children enrolled in it were found to be 22pc less likely to be stunted at six months. The challenge is to connect such interventions with primary healthcare, family planning, clean water, sanitation and local social services, rather than treating each as a separate scheme.
The conference’s proposal to regard nutrition spending as capital investment rather than simply health expenditure is also worth pursuing. Preventing stunting is investment in future learning, productivity and national income. But declarations must now give way to measurable commitments. Pakistan still relies on the 2018 National Nutrition Survey for its headline 40.2pc stunting figure, an extraordinary data gap for a crisis repeatedly described as a national emergency. A fresh national survey, dedicated budget lines, provincial and district targets, named officials responsible for delivery and regular public reporting should be the minimum next steps. Recognising food and nutritional security as a basic right may strengthen the framework, but rights without budgets and accountability remain promises on paper. Pakistan knows how malnutrition comes about and what can reduce it. The failure is no longer one of knowledge. It is the state’s failure to organise itself around the child. The conference has sharpened the diagnosis. Government must now prove it can deliver.
Published in Dawn, September 6th, 2026
