…Only 6% of pregnant women complete recommended iron supplementation as child stunting remains above 40%
Nigeria’s nutrition crisis is exposing a widening gap between government commitments and outcomes, with only six per cent of pregnant women completing at least 180 days of iron-containing supplementation in 2024, against a national target of 70 per cent by 2035.
The disclosure, made at the 56th Annual General Meeting and Scientific Conference of the Nutrition Society of Nigeria (NSN) in Lagos on Tuesday, brought into sharp focus the difficulty of translating Nigeria’s nutrition policies, programmes and investments into measurable improvements in the lives of women and children.
The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Health and Focal Person on Nutrition in the Office of the Vice President, Mrs Uju Rochas-Anwukah, who represented Vice President Kashim Shettima, said the figure was one of several indicators showing the scale of the country’s nutrition challenge.
She also disclosed that only 30 per cent of women of reproductive age met the minimum dietary diversity requirement, against a national target of 60 per cent by 2035.
According to her, the figures were not merely health statistics but indicators with direct implications for Nigeria’s human capital, productivity and development.
She said anaemia resulting from poor nutrition could weaken women and children, worsen pregnancy outcomes, reduce learning capacity and ultimately affect productivity.
Rochas-Anwukah said nutrition could no longer be treated as an issue belonging to one ministry or one stage of life, stressing that interventions must connect childhood, adolescence, pregnancy, adulthood and old age.
“Policy fails when it treats those stages as separate rooms,” she said.
Her remarks captured one of the central concerns raised at the conference: Nigeria has increasingly recognised nutrition as a national development issue, but the challenge is moving from policy commitments and programmes to sustained implementation and measurable results.
The NSN President, Prof. Salisu Maiwada Abubakar, said Nigeria remained off track to meet the World Health Assembly nutrition targets and Sustainable Development Goal 2.2 by 2030.
The latest 2025–26 Mini-Demographic and Health Survey figures presented at the conference showed that 41.1 per cent of Nigerian children under five are stunted, while 19.2 per cent are severely stunted.
The situation is even worse in the North-West, where 58.2 per cent of children under five were reported to be stunted.
Wasting stood at 4.7 per cent, while only 25.3 per cent of children under five had received any iron-containing supplements in the preceding year.
These figures point to a nutrition crisis that goes beyond hunger.
Poor diets and inadequate micronutrient intake can affect physical growth, brain development, immunity, school performance and future earning potential. The consequences therefore extend from households to schools, workplaces, healthcare systems and the wider economy.
Abubakar said the country was also battling “hidden hunger” caused by deficiencies in essential micronutrients such as vitamin A, zinc and folic acid, despite efforts to expand supplementation, fortification and other nutrition interventions.
The NSN president said the challenge was compounded by food insecurity and poverty.
He cited the 2025 Global Hunger Index, which gave Nigeria a score of 32.8 and ranked the country 115th out of 123 countries, describing the situation as serious.
The National Bureau of Statistics has also reported that 133 million Nigerians, or about 63 per cent of the population, were living in multidimensional poverty, with inadequate nutrition among the dimensions of deprivation.
For children, the consequences are particularly severe.
Abubakar cited UNICEF data showing that Nigeria has one of the world’s largest populations of children living with stunting, while nearly two million children are estimated to suffer from severe acute malnutrition, with only about two in 10 reached with treatment.
The challenge is being intensified by conflict and displacement.
The Cadre Harmonisé projection indicates that nearly 36 million Nigerians could face acute food insecurity during the 2026 lean season, the highest projected figure so far, with conflict identified as a major driver.
Yet, across the country, governments are spending money and introducing programmes aimed at reversing the trend.
Katsina State Deputy Governor Faruk Lawal Jobe, who represented Governor Dikko Umar Radda, said the state had spent N1.7 billion on targeted nutrition interventions and more than N30 billion on food and other support for vulnerable households.
The state, he said, had also introduced six months’ paid maternity leave to support exclusive breastfeeding, expanded iron and folic acid supplementation for pregnant women and trained more than 1,000 healthcare workers and 600 community volunteers in maternal, infant and young-child nutrition.
Katsina has also upgraded and equipped 271 of its 361 wards’ primary healthcare centres, while six comprehensive health centres have been upgraded to general hospitals.
The state is planning a local nutrition food factory and has budgeted for a nutrition survey.
These interventions demonstrate what states can do when nutrition is linked to health, agriculture, social protection and economic policy. But they also raise a critical question: how can successful interventions be taken to scale and sustained across all states and local government areas?
That question is central to the Federal Government’s Nutrition 774 initiative, which seeks to take nutrition interventions to all 774 local government areas.
Rochas-Anwukah said the National Nutrition Dashboard should also be used to strengthen accountability and ensure that decision-making is based on evidence.
She urged policymakers to judge food fortification not by the number of regulations issued but by whether micronutrient deficiencies are actually reduced.
The same principle, she said, should apply to the National Policy on Food and Nutrition 2026–2035.
“Good intentions do not feed a child,” she said, calling for adequate and timely financing, proper budget releases and stronger links between expenditure and community-level results.
The Chairman of the NSN Board of Trustees, the Emir of Kano, Khalifa Muhammad Sanusi II, pushed the argument further, saying nutrition must be treated as a national development and human-capital investment rather than a narrow health programme.
He called for protected nutrition funding, timely releases, expenditure tracking and greater accountability for results.
Sanusi said Nigeria needed to move from fragmented interventions to coordinated systems, from short-term projects to sustained investment and from policy commitments on paper to measurable outcomes.
He also called for urgent passage and implementation of the Nutritionist Registration Council of Nigeria Bill, arguing that a properly regulated professional workforce was necessary to strengthen nutrition services.
The keynote speaker, Dr Mansur Muhtar, focused on another critical weakness: financing.
He warned that Nigeria could not continue to depend heavily on development partners and philanthropic organisations to finance nutrition programmes, particularly at a time when global development resources were under pressure.
According to him, domestic financing must become the foundation of Nigeria’s nutrition response.
But he stressed that increasing funding alone would not solve the problem.
Nigeria must ensure that every naira allocated to nutrition produces measurable impact, while strengthening transparency, monitoring and reporting.
Muhtar also called for innovative financing, including greater participation by the private sector, capital markets and responsible corporate investment.
His argument was that nutrition financing should be viewed as an investment in human capital rather than simply an expenditure.
The Lagos State Government also stressed the need for a multisectoral response.
The Permanent Secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Health, Dr Dayo Lajide, said the state viewed nutrition as a life-course issue involving health, agriculture, education, social protection, water and sanitation, women affairs and other sectors.
He called for stronger nutrition surveillance, better data, evidence-informed policies and targeted interventions for vulnerable populations.
Lagos, he said, had strengthened its nutrition architecture, including the establishment of the position of Director of Nutrition, while working with government agencies, local governments, communities, academia, civil society and development partners.
For the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), the focus is also on what Nigerians eat and what they know about the food they consume.
The Director-General, Prof Mojisola Adeyeye, said NAFDAC was committed to working with the NSN to promote safe, wholesome and nutritious food and appropriately labelled products.
She highlighted the agency’s “Read the Food Label” campaign, which seeks to encourage consumers to pay greater attention to nutritional information when purchasing food.
But the conference made clear that consumer awareness alone cannot solve Nigeria’s nutrition crisis.
The country needs functioning food systems that make nutritious food available and affordable; health services capable of delivering supplementation; schools that support healthy diets; social protection that reaches vulnerable households; reliable nutrition data; effective regulation and financing that reaches communities.
Researchers, too, were challenged to move beyond producing studies for academic journals.
Rochas-Anwukah urged researchers to identify implementation failures, interrogate available data and produce evidence that can be used in clinics, farms, schools, markets and households.
This is perhaps the central challenge facing Nigeria’s nutrition agenda.
The country is not short of policies, committees, programmes or declarations. It has a new National Policy on Food and Nutrition for 2026–2035, the Nutrition 774 initiative, state-level nutrition councils and interventions, food fortification programmes, supplementation campaigns and proposed legislation for professional regulation.
What remains uncertain is whether these initiatives will produce results at the scale required.
The NSN conference therefore ended with a message that was as much about governance as nutrition: Nigeria must close the distance between what it promises, what it funds and what Nigerians actually experience.
Until that happens, the figures, six per cent supplementation among pregnant women, 41.1 per cent child stunting nationally and 58.2 per cent in the North-West, will remain more than statistics.
They will continue to represent children failing to reach their full potential, women entering pregnancy without adequate nutritional protection and a country paying an increasingly heavy price for failing to invest effectively in its people.