Thirty-Fifth Session of the Standing Committee on Nutrition

Accelerating the Reduction of Maternal and Child Undernutrition

2-6 March 2008, Hanoi, Viet Nam
Hosted by the Government of Viet Nam

Chaired by Ms Ann Veneman, Executive Director of UNICEF and SCN Chair

More than 350 participants from a wide range of agencies, organizations and countries met to discuss how to accelerate the reduction of maternal and child undernutrition at the 35th SCN Session, held 2-7 March 2008 in Hanoi, Vietnam, hosted by the Vietnamese Government. There was broad agreement that the recent Lancet Nutrition Series brings an important new body of evidence for the enormous burden and consequences of maternal and child undernutrition that is inhibiting global development. The Series also provides important new evidence for the benefit of a set of specific nutrition interventions, operating at the immediate and underlying levels that together, in addition to other poverty reduction efforts, can help to accelerate the reduction of maternal and child undernutrition and in doing so contribute to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Furthermore the Lancet Nutrition Series outlines some of the institutional and coordinative capacities that are needed at the national and international levels in order to allow this set of interventions to be taken scale in the most affected countries. The SCN participants, bringing with them experience from their respective fields of expertise, discussed how the key messages and contributions from the Lancet Series would help to move the agenda forward in their respective thematic and geographic working areas and the role of the SCN in helping to doing this.


Session Documentation:



The SCN News 36 (mid-2008) features papers from the presentations on the Symposium on Monday 3 March.
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