Undernutrition for women and children is a major driver of infant and child morbidity and mortality. Supplementary and therapeutic products for malnutrition have the proven potential to save many lives and substantially improve health outcomes in mothers and children – but market access remains low even for the most mature of these products, and innovative products have an uncertain path to reaching scale.
The Maternal and Child Wasting Management project used a hypothesis-driven approach to explore market barriers and develop strategic options for the introduction or scale-up of four key lipid-based nutritional commodities: small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements (SQ-LNS); lipid-based nutrient supplements for pregnant and lactating women (LNS-PLW) and/or balanced energy protein (BEP) supplements; ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF); and, microbiome-directed RUTF (MD-RUTF).
This diagnostic report provides a holistic analysis of the critical challenges limiting product introduction and scale-up across key market domains and serves as a resource for decision-makers to better understand the market barriers and opportunities to increasing access to LNS commodities, globally and in the focus geographies of Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kano State in Nigeria, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province in Pakistan, and Tanzania.
