Understanding the role of nutrition-sensitive social protection interventions in child nutritional outcomes

Policy responses to childhood nutritional outcomes broadly comprise nutrition-specific interventions and nutrition-sensitive interventions. Nutrition-specific interventions are interventions that directly target nutritional outcomes. Nutrition-sensitive interventions address the social determinants of health - that is, the underlying causes of undernutrition. Such programmes include interventions that address poor living conditions, promoting maternal health and education, early childhood development programmes, and social sector reforms in the form of in-kind transfers such as school feeding schemes and cash transfers. Nutrition-sensitive interventions are regarded as having strong potential to address undernutrition effectively, with nutrition-sensitive social protection programmes in the form of cash transfers having emerged as a key policy response to child malnutrition. This chapter considers how cash and other nutrition-specific interventions could work in combination to impact on child health and nutritional outcomes in the global South. In this way the chapter contributes to understanding the role of nutrition-sensitive social protection in improving child nutritional outcomes.