The Zambia Civil Society Scaling up Nutrition Alliance ( Zambia CSO-SUN Alliance) is a movement of national Civil Society Organizations (CSO’s) working to raise the profile of nutrition on the national development agenda. We are a part of the global Movement founded on the principle that all people have a right to food and good nutrition. We unite people across sectors, including government, the United Nations, donors, private sector, civil society and researchers. The Alliance is working towards " A Zambia where every child is assured of sufficient nutrition through strengthened policy, financial commitment and adequate programme implementation". As am Alliance, we focus our attention on the critical 1,000 day window of opportunity from pregnancy until a child’s second birthday, during which time nutrition has the greatest impact on saving lives, developing a child’s cognitive and physical capacity and mitigating the risk of chronic diseases. After this point, child malnutrition is extremely difficult to change.
Our role as a civil society is to raise awareness, increase the profile of this issue and pressure government and others to ensure much better funded and broad scale effective programmes to tackle under nutrition. We intend to achieve this by mobilizing, coordinating and building the capacity of the Civil Societies to influence national efforts through constructive dialogue, advocacy with stakeholders, including the Government, donors and private sector, thereby contributing to improved leadership and accountability towards the national SUN/ 1000 days movement. Further, we enable Zambian CSO’s to adapt and incorporate relevant positive lessons learned from other countries.