South Asia contributes to 40 per cent of the annual global low birth weight burden, with an estimated 10 million children born with low birth weight. Poor women’s nutrition and gender inequalities are the main causes for stagnantly high prevalence of low birth in South Asia. In South Asia, most women enter pregnancy with one of more nutrition risks – 22% of women are too thin, 49% women are anaemic, 20% suffer from obesity, 10% are adolescents, and 35% are too short for their age. The low diversity of diets of women is worrisome, particularly in fragile countries - for example, 26% of adolescent girls and women access a minimally diverse diets in Afghanistan. Data also shows that 90% of women in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan are affected with at least one of the three micronutrient deficiencies - iron, zinc, and folate.

Undeniably, concerted multi-sectoral efforts have been made by national governments on several of the ten actions to scale up maternal nutrition interventions through multisystem approaches (health, social protection, food and education). Systems research, and effectiveness trials on innovative products and delivery systems have been experimented with as well as new partnerships and alliances that have been made across countries.

However, the successes in scaling up efforts for antenatal nutrition have been uneven and negatively impacted by the lingering effects of COVID-19, climate and conflict emergencies. Opportunities are remain untapped or missed for bundling the delivery of the nutrition interventions in health and social protection delivery platforms. For example, outreach antenatal contacts may not necessarily deliver a comprehensive set of nutrition services and those that do deliver, often miss adolescent mothers.

Overall, delivering preconception nutrition services is abysmal or falls far short of being provided routinely. For adolescent girls, while seven out of eight countries of South Asia deliver at least two or the three interventions (micronutrient supplements, deworming, nutrition and health education) through schools and out of school platforms, the coverage is uneven or absent in poor geographies which also have weak governance and overall delivery constraints.

In less than three years, at the 2025 World Health Assembly, the world’s leaders including those from South Asia will meet and review progress against ambitions set to reduce low birth weight, anemia in women and all forms of child malnutrition. Reducing nutrition inequities to reach underserved adolescent girls and women is critical for achieving the 2025 World Health Assembly targets.

With this background, a call for papers is being proposed ‘Scaling-up equitable nutritional care for girls and women in South Asia’. This Research Topic will discuss new evidence, policy and programme progress and identify actions to accelerate the equitable nutritional care of girls and women before during and after pregnancy in South Asia. It will also provide a platform to seek updates from new evidence, guidelines with a spotlight on nutritionally at-risk women and preconception nutrition in South Asia. As such, this collection aims to:

• Share new evidence for improving nutrition of girls and women - undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, anemia and obesity in South Asia
• Share policy and programme progress and challenges in equitable delivery of proven nutrition interventions for adolescent girls and women through multi-systems.
• Share and discuss critical actions for ushering political, administrative, financial and accountability and programmatic actions for improving girls and women’s nutrition, in un/underserved populations.

We welcome submissions including but not limited to the following tracks:
• Programme efficacy
• Program Implementation and Effectiveness at-scale and with equity
• Designing interventions in real time government systems – health, social protection and food systems
• Designing Enabling Environments

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Frontiers in Nutrition

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