Nutrition
From donor dependence to national ownership: Ghana’s path to sustainable child nutrition
An estimated 68,517 children in Ghana currently suffer from Severe Acute Malnutrition, yet only about 15 percent receive treatment. This gap is not due to a lack of effective solutions, but to limited and unstable access driven by fragmented, donor-dependent financing. As Ghana advances toward universal health coverage and economic self-reliance, ensuring sustainable and equitable child nutrition services requires urgent policy action.
Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) and Multiple Micronutrient Supplements (MMS) are proven, cost-effective interventions. RUTF achieves recovery rates of 75–90 percent among children with severe acute malnutrition, while MMS reduces low birth weight and preterm birth. Both interventions are included in Ghana’s Essential Medicines List and Standard Treatment Guidelines. National protocols are finalised and disseminated, and over 600 health workers have been trained. In short, Ghana has laid the policy and technical groundwork.
Despite this readiness, access remains constrained by reliance on donor funding. Time-bound financing leads to supply disruptions, uneven geographic coverage, and weak long-term planning. Service availability often reflects donor priorities rather than population need.
Most critically, national ownership is undermined when lifesaving child nutrition interventions depend on external support. Donor dependence also limits system integration. Nutrition services delivered through projects remain peripheral to routine care. Health facilities cannot fully integrate RUTF and MMS into standard maternal and child health services without predictable supply. Data systems, quality assurance, and accountability mechanisms remain fragmented, preventing these interventions from reaching scale and impact.
Integrating RUTF and MMS into the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) offers a clear pathway to sustainable national ownership. With 84 percent of mothers of children under five already enrolled, NHIS provides an existing platform for rapid and equitable scale-up. The 2025 uncapping of the National Health Insurance Levy further strengthens the financing base. NHIS inclusion would remove out-of-pocket costs for vulnerable families, standardise service delivery nationwide, and embed nutrition care within routine health services.
The cost implications are manageable. MMS costs approximately USD 2.50 per pregnancy for a full course, representing a small fraction of current undernutrition spending. Timely community-based RUTF treatment also reduces costly hospital admissions for complicated and severe malnutrition. Ongoing Health Technology Assessments will provide Ghana-specific evidence to guide reimbursement decisions.
Domestic financing brings broader benefits. It ensures stronger government accountability, improved data reporting, better quality assurance, and long-term planning beyond donor cycles. Most importantly, it affirms that the survival and wellbeing of Ghanaian children are national responsibilities.
The policy decision before Ghana’s leadership is clear. The clinical evidence supports RUTF and MMS. The regulatory framework is established. The implementation capacity exists through trained health workers and operational guidelines. The financing mechanism is available through NHIS with its recently expanded revenue base. What remains is the political committment to prioritise sustainable nutrition financing as part of Ghana’s Universal Health Coverage roadmap and broader development agenda.
Donor support has been valuable in establishing these interventions and building implementation capacity. The transition to domestic financing should be viewed not as disengagement but as graduating to full national ownership. Development partners can continue supporting technical assistance, capacity building, and innovation while Ghana secures sustaining coverage at scale.
The gap between 15 percent coverage and the 80 to 90 percent achievable with adequate financing represents thousands of preventable child deaths and compromised maternal health outcomes annually. Closing this gap through NHIS integration of RUTF and MMS is not merely a technical health financing decision. It is a statement of national values and priorities, affirming that every Ghanaian child deserves access to lifesaving nutrition treatment regardless of circumstance. It is a foundation for sustainable human capital development.
Feature article by Women, Media and Change under its Nourish Ghana: Advocating for Increased Leadership to Combat Malnutrition project.
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Ghana has nutrition policies. Ghana has nutrition targets. Ghana has nutrition programmes spread across multiple ministries and dozens of implementing partners.
What Ghana does not have is a single, empowered body responsible for leading, coordinating, and holding all this together. That is the gap a National Nutrition Council would fill, and stakeholders are calling for one now.
The case for a council
At a stakeholder engagement convened under the Nourish Ghana project in 2025, participants proposed the establishment of a National Nutrition Council to provide effective leadership and a governance framework for addressing malnutrition in Ghana. The meeting, which brought together policymakers, development partners, civil society organisations, and the media, highlighted a fundamental problem: nutrition responsibilities are fragmented across various ministries. Without a dedicated coordination body, efforts are duplicated, accountability is diffuse, and nutrition consistently loses out when budgets are tight.
The proposal echoes a model used in several countries that have made the fastest progress against malnutrition. Nigeria’s National Council on Nutrition, for example, recently pledged $107 million at the 2025 N4G Summit, a level of coordinated ambition that Ghana has struggled to match.
Ghana does have existing coordination structures worth acknowledging. The Scaling Up Nutrition Cross-Sectoral Planning Group (CSPG), established in 2012, was set up to harmonise planning, implementation, and monitoring of nutrition actions across sectors. It has produced real gains. But the challenge has been institutionalising those gains beyond project cycles, and analysts have called for an elevated national coordination body with presidential oversight to ensure genuine cross-sector accountability. A National Nutrition Council would go further, providing the dedicated financing and convening authority that the CSPG, as currently structured, does not have.
What a Council would do
A National Nutrition Council would provide political oversight and coordination across all sectors involved in nutrition, health, agriculture, education, social protection, and finance. It would track Ghana’s nutrition commitments, hold ministries accountable for delivery, and ensure that nutrition budgets are protected and spent effectively. Most importantly, it would give nutrition a permanent seat at the table where national development decisions are made.
The Time Is Now
Ghana made 10 commitments at the 2025 N4G Paris Summit. Translating those commitments into results requires a governance structure that does not currently exist. Establishing a National Nutrition Council is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is the institutional foundation without which Ghana’s nutrition ambitions will remain promises on paper. Leaders must act on this proposal without delay.
Feature article by Women, Media and Change under its Nourish Ghana: Advocating for Increased Leadership to Combat Malnutrition project
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