Dear friends,
When I last wrote, the Board of Champions was about to meet for the third time, and the question I left open was whether we could do better together rather than retreat into separate lanes. The quest for an answer continues. Meeting in Paris alongside the OECD Conference on the Future of International Cooperation for Development, the Board endorsed a move to a fully country-driven approach for encouraging national implementation planning and mobilising support to large-scale social protection and food security programmes. The Board also mandated a structured dialogue about a possible mechanism that could help integrate development, humanitarian and climate finance behind those plans. Mozambique joined the Board, and the European Union and Germany stepped into Vice-Chair roles in the Core Group, succeeding Norway and the United Kingdom.
None of this settles the hard part of turning an agreed direction into financing that actually lands on a country’s plan, but the direction is now shared, and that matters.
The political backdrop of the OECD conference was candid about the headwinds. Official development assistance fell by more than 23% between 2024 and 2025, with further cuts expected. At the OECD conference, Brazil’s Minister Wellington Dias argued that the fight against hunger and poverty has to stay at the centre “not only as a moral imperative, but because it is an essential condition for stability, resilience, peace and democracy,” tying resilience for the most vulnerable to advancing social protection through national systems, as recognised in the Belém Declaration adopted at COP30.
Later in the month, at Rome Nutrition Week, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez put the stakes plainly: malnutrition, he said, robs children not only of their present but “of something far more precious: their future before they even know they have one.” Sánchez highlighted the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, which Spain currently co-leads with Brazil in their role chairing the Board of Champions, as a key demonstration of Spain’s commitment to food security and nutrition as well as to renewed, effective and inclusive multilateralism.
A clear sign that commitments can become delivery came from GAFSP. In an interview for this edition, its head, Shobha Shetty, set out how the programme is making good on its Family Farming Sprint commitment. GAFSP just opened a new call for country-led proposals, aiming to award national projects that increase agricultural productivity and farm-to-market linkages, reduce risk and vulnerability, improve rural livelihoods and entrepreneurship, and strengthen institutions in eligible low-income countries. GAFSP’s call for country-led proposals is by nature aligned with the Global Alliance approach. The Support Mechanism has contributed to communicate this opportunity to the country governments in its country support portfolio, and is working with those interested governments in preparing applications.
This edition’s Policy Basket highlights show the same logic at national scale. Bolivia’s CRIAR gave smallholders non-reimbursable vouchers covering 90% of the cost of a technology they choose, paired with field-based technical assistance; across roughly 69,000 farmers it raised the value of production per hectare by 92% and net agricultural income by 36%, and left beneficiary households markedly more likely to be food secure.
Ethiopia’s Integrated Agro-Industrial Parks reach the same goal by a different route, clustering agro-processing to link smallholders to modern supply chains and cut post-harvest loss. As of 2026 the parks had drawn in over 344,000 smallholder farmers and more than sixty enterprises, mobilising around USD 1.5 billion — most of it domestic and private, with development partners alongside. That blend — government resources first, partners and private capital aligned behind them — is again at play in Yelemat Tirufat, “bounty of basket”, Ethiopia’s new flagship programme to reinforce local livestock value chains, whose second phase is being planned with Alliance support.
And for some small good news: you will be able to read all of the above news stories in more languages. The Alliance website is now available in English, Portuguese, French and Spanish. If the point is for what works in one country to be usable in another, the knowledge has to cross languages as well as borders.
That’s a wrap for the month!
All the best,
Renato D. Godinho
Director, Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty
Support Mechanism
