Nutrition

Led by UNICEF and WHO, the Global Breastfeeding Collective is a partnership of more than 20 prominent international agencies calling on donors, policymakers, philanthropists and civil society to increase investment in breastfeeding worldwide. The Collective’s vision is a world in which all mothers have the technical, financial, emotional and public support they need to breastfeed. The Collective advocates for smart investments in breastfeeding programmes, assists policymakers and NGOs in implementing solutions, and galvanizes support to get real results to increase rates of breastfeeding, thereby benefiting mothers, children and nations.

Download the advocacy brief on breastfeeding and HIV above. Learn more at unicef.org/breastfeeding.

The first WHO guidelines on HIV and Infant Feeding in 2010 recommended the use of antiretroviral drugs to prevent postnatal transmission of HIV through breastfeeding. Since then, almost all countries prioritised in the UNAIDS ‘Global Plan towards the elimination of new HIV infections among children by 2015 and keeping their mothers alive’ have adopted the approach of promoting and supporting breastfeeding and the provision of lifelong antiretroviral treatment as the strategy to optimise HIV-free survival among HIV-exposed, uninfected infants and children. The 2016 guidelines provide two recommendations and two guiding practice statements and they comment on the implications for: (1) routine monitoring and evaluation, and (2) conflict and emergency settings.

This document discusses the following: general messages about early childhood development, programming messages, nutrition, protection,  early & lifelong learning,  health, parenting, advocacy messages, and key facts about the developing brain. The messages presented in this note were generated from a Neuroscience Symposium organized by UNICEF on April 16, 2014, where 16 leading international scientists from different fields of neuroscience presented their latest evidence on the influences of experience and environment on child brain development.