Investing in Nutrition and Early Years

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The objective of the Investing in Nutrition and Early Years Project for Indonesia is to increase simultaneous utilization of nutrition interventions by 1,000‐day households in priority districts. Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state, fourth most populous nation, and tenth‐largest economy in purchasing power parity terms. It is a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations group of countries as well as the G‐20. Indonesia has a population of more than 261 million, with 300 distinct ethnic groups and over 700 languages and dialects. With a gross national income per capita of about $3,440 (2015), Indonesia is classified as a lower middle‐income country. Indonesia has made significant gains in economic growth and poverty reduction in the past decade. Relatively strong economic growth (5.5 percent per year since 2000) has been accompanied by a sustained decline in poverty rates: about 31 percent and 6.8 percent of the population lived on $3.1 a day and $1.9 a day, respectively, in 2016, down from 82 percent and 48 percent, respectively, in 1998.1 However, Indonesia’s progress on poverty reduction contrasts sharply with its performance in sharing prosperity. Inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, increased from 30 points in 2000 to 41 points by 2014, by far the fastest widening in the East Asia and Pacific Region. The county’s strong growth and sustained investments in human capital, allocating 25 percent of the national budget to health and education, have translated into significant progress in service delivery and human development. In education, gross enrollment has reached 100 percent, 83 percent, and 32 percent in primary, secondary, and tertiary education, respectively; life expectancy at birth has steadily increased to 69 years in 2015, up from 63 years in 1990; and the under‐five mortality rate has declined from 85 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 26 in 2016. Furthermore, the convergence of priority nutrition‐specific and nutrition‐sensitive interventions on households with pregnant mothers and children under two is low. There is growing global and local evidence that a ‘convergence’ approach, in which multisectoral interventions are coordinated to jointly target priority geographic areas and beneficiaries, is critical to accelerating improvements in health and child development outcomes and can help address stunting.