Breastfeeding is one of the best values among investments in child survival, recognized for both the magnitude of its effect on mortality and the effectiveness of interventions to promote it1. There is compelling scientific evidence2 that optimal breastfeeding of infants under one year could prevent around a million deaths of children under-five in the developing world. Yaet global rates of breastfeeding rates have remained stagnant since 1990 with only 36 per cent of children less than six months exclusively breastfed in 20123.
Why has such strong scientific evidence not been translated into political and donor commitment for breastfeeding at the global level and in high burden countries? What can the global breast- feeding policy community do to augment attention and commitment to breastfeeding? Seeking answers to these questions, UNICEF’s Nutrition Section conducted a landscape analysis to assess the political commitment and priority for breastfeeding interventions globally and in selected countries, in order to determine the need for, and potential benefits of, a targeted initiative to enhance leadership and advocacy.
Political commitment is defined here as the degree to which leaders of international organizations and national political systems actively pay attention to an issue and provide resources commensurate with the issue’s importance4. This analysis has focused primarily on the former. It is framed with the acknowledgement that a large variety of determinants influence country and thereby global breastfeeding patterns, and focus the findings and conclusions on the contribution a global community of advocates might make to improving breastfeeding amidst this causal complexity, and particularly in influencing one aspect of the causal picture: global political attention and leadership. The analysis does not address issues and solutions which are outside of this remit, for example those relating to legislation, programmatic strategies, communication for behavior change and so on.