Opening Speech – Mrs. Hiwot Darsene, Lead Executive Officer- Nutrition Coordination Office
Scaling Up Nutrition – Ethiopia 2023 Joint Annual Assessment Reporting (SUN Multi-Stakeholders Platform (MSP) Workshop Dear Leads and members of SUN Scaling up Nutrition Networks Good morning One of the key pillar in operationalization of the Ethiopian food and nutrition policy; Ethiopian food system transformation and Seqota Declaration is strengthening the global, regional and national partnership between the government, donors, partners, private sectors, academia and other stakeholders. This partnership will be effective if we realized functional and workable platform that will support the programmatic and advocacy priorities that will address the challenges these programs are facing; financial, technical, skill, evidence, etc to mention some. As we all know, Ethiopia Joined SUN Global Movement in September 2010. Since then, the Multi Stakeholder Platform (MSP) is providing technical assistance and financial resource mobilization to NNP I and II and now for food system and nutrition coordination and Seqota Declaration implementation. In addition, it has achieved a number of milestones through strengthening the food and nutrition plans at national and subnational levels. Last year we have identified a number of programmatic and advocacy priorities and their joint assessment will be an opportunity to reflect on our progress through active engagement of all scaling up nutrition actors, and making course corrective priority actions for the challenges and bottlenecks that our program faces. Today’s workshop will enable us to jointly reflect on our progress, celebrate achievements and plan for 2024. In this regard, I will like to thank the SUN networks who finalized and submitted their JAA in a timely manner. We hope other networks will share their network specific progress in our workshop today. We are cognizant of the time and effort it will take to prepare these reports. In this regard, I want to thank all the SUN networks for your contribution and Network Leaders for your leadership and making your network specific report ready for the workshop. Based on our past experiences effective, participatory and inclusive review and documentation during the JAA could help to realize our progresses; discuss how to maximize and deliver on nutrition commitments; agree on priority actions for the next year; communicate our progresses and challenges with the regional and global SUN Movement platforms. In the year 2023 the program and advocacy priorities were instrumental for driving the FNS, SD and FST priorities. We also expect this workshop will also help us to identify priorities to be more problem solving oriented, actionable, achievable and could accelerate the attainment of our goals. In this regard I call upon all the six networks to give due attention to this important process. Once we completed this process we will present this to the high-level endorsement ahead of its final submission date March 1-2024. Finally, I look forward your active participation and the effort you are making to realize our ambitious goal ENDING ALL FORMS OF MALNUTRTION IN ETHIOPIA. Thank You and the workshop is opened.
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