Right2Grow was a civil-society advocacy partnership for children’s right to grow up healthy, helping communities turn their own evidence into decisions, and shifting how local governments plan and budget for nutrition and WASH.

Child undernutrition is rarely solved by one sector acting alone. It sits across nutrition, water and sanitation, gender and economic opportunity, and the decisions that shape it are made in local government offices and national budgets, not only in clinics.

Too often, the communities most affected have the least influence over those decisions, and local budgets carry little for child nutrition. Right2Grow set out to change who is at the table when those choices are made, and what evidence they bring with them.

6

countries in the partnership

Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Mali, South Sudan, Uganda

Integrated

Linking nutrition, WASH, gender and economic growth, because undernutrition sits across all of them.

Community-led

Communities generated their own evidence and made their own demands, rather than having them made on their behalf.

Right2Grow, one of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Power of Voices partnerships, worked with communities, community-based organisations and civil society, including women and other groups often left out, to collect their own data, convert it into evidence, and use it to hold decision-makers to account. Max Foundation contributed its integrated nutrition and WASH expertise to the partnership.

Community-generated evidence

Local organisations gathered their own data and stories on nutrition and WASH and turned them into evidence compelling enough to change decisions, shifting communities from subjects of programmes to authors of the case for change.

Advocacy and accountability

The partnership connected communities with government and held decision-makers to account, opening space for local demands to be heard where budgets and plans are actually set.

Inclusive participation

Women and other groups often excluded from these conversations were central to the approach, strengthening both the fairness and the credibility of the demands made.

Cross-sector partnership

Working with international and local partners across six countries, Right2Grow treated undernutrition as the shared, cross-sector challenge it is, rather than any single organisation’s remit.

Community advocacy in action, Bangladesh.

Across the partnership, the clearest results are in how local governments now plan and budget. In Bangladesh, nutrition- and WASH-sensitive budgets across 40 Union Parishads rose from 1.45% in 2021 to 18% in 2025, an estimated €1.4 million redirected towards children’s health, and a shift that lives in council planning rather than in a project report.

975,455

people reached

across the partnership

40 of 40

Union Parishads now budgeting for nutrition

in Bangladesh

18%

of local budgets now go to nutrition and WASH

up from 1.45% in 2021

181

health centres supported

by 2025

Max Foundation measures impact not by what a programme delivered while it ran, but by what still works once it ends. Two tools built with communities during Right2Grow now sit inside Bangladesh’s own systems, funded by local councils and recognised nationally.

The partnership’s strength was local leadership, the community leaders, advocates and health workers who carried the case for change.