The SUN CSN Governance Webinar Series got off to a strong start with its first episode, an engaging peer-to-peer learning session focused on fundraising. 

With fundraising becoming increasingly challenging for many Civil Society Alliances (CSAs), the webinar provided a valuable space to exchange practical experiences, share lessons learned and explore approaches to strengthening fundraising efforts. Most importantly, it created an opportunity for CSAs to learn directly from one another and hear what is working in different contexts. 

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to our fantastic presenters — Sunday from Nigeria, Ben from Namibia and Edgar from Kenya — for generously sharing their experiences, insights and practical advice. Their contributions offered valuable perspectives on navigating the fundraising landscape and demonstrated the importance of collaboration and peer learning across the SUN CSN community. 

You can access the presentation here and watch the episode on the link below with French and Spanish subtitles. 

As part of the Generation Nutrition initiative, ACF’s Margherita Dacquino delivered a webinar and Q&A session for SUN CSN Civil Society Alliances (CSAs) on how to engage with EU Delegations at country level and advocate for nutrition to be prioritised within the EU’s development agenda. The session was particularly timely as the EU begins to shape its programming and allocation of funding for the 2028–2034 period. These multi-year funds will support long-term development cooperation across a range of priority areas, presenting an important opportunity for CSAs to engage early with EU Delegations and advocate for nutrition to be integrated into future country-level programmes and investments. 

EU Delegations around the world have been tasked with conducting country assessments to identify priority areas for EU support. These assessments will inform the programming cycle. So, engagement at country level is often where influence is strongest, so we want CSAs to be aware of this process and engage with their EU delegations to raise nutrition as a key priority. As a result, an EU Delegation Engagement Toolkit was developed to support the CSAs. 

“Civil society plays an important role in shortening the distance between rights-holders and duty-bearers, bringing community realities into the spaces where decisions are made, and following up on the commitments made there.”

These are the words shared by Barbara Rehbinder, Deputy Head – Strategy & Advocacy at the SUN Civil Society Network during her participation at the Micronutrient Forum in Accra, Ghana. 

SUN CSN was well represented at MNF this year. Members from Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines joined Bessie and Barbara from the SUN CSN Secretariat, and World Vision International explicitly recognised the Network in the opening discussions. At a Forum where sessions were primarily technical, SUN CSN contributed to sessions on policy coherence and accountability, family planning and nutrition integration, and the right to nutritious food. Drawing on civil society experience, it showed how budget analysis and parliamentary engagement help turn nutrition commitments into funded action, including advocacy for a Child Nutrition Fund in Zimbabwe. It also presented evidence from more than 100 community Nutrition Dialogues across nearly 20 countries, including youth-led dialogues in Bangladesh that reached marginalised fishing communities previously excluded from nutrition consultations. Its central message, that participation matters only when it changes decisions, addressed a gap in a programme that gave limited attention to rights, accountability and private-sector safeguards. Meetings with partners generated interest in SUN CSN’s private sector engagement work, with Nigeria identified as an early opportunity to collaborate with ATNI. Together, these exchanges position SUN CSN as a country-rooted bridge between technical evidence, political accountability and community voice, with concrete follow-up planned with partners

Barbara shares more in the blog below. 

 

In a recent blog for Bond UK, Head of SUN CSN, Alexandra Newlands, addressed the question “Everyone in the development sector seems to agree on #localisation. So why does so little actually change?”, drawing on conversations with Network members across 67 countries.  

 
The short version: it’s not that people don’t care. It’s that a lot of the machinery around funding, reporting and risk was built for a different kind of organisation than the ones actually doing the work closest to communities. Funding rarely matches capacity, and the instruments meant to support local organisations often assume infrastructure they don’t necessarily yet have. 

When the SUNCSN developed the 2026-2030 strategy,  localisation was the cross-cutting principle through each of the four strategic objectives to actually move decision making and funding closer to where the impact happens.  
 
Read the two-part blog below to understand what CSN’s localisation commitments, built into the 5-year strategy, mean in practice.  

 

Little Joshua’s journey illustrates how SUN CSA Papua New Guinea, hosted by World Vision PNG’s community-based nutrition programming is helping vulnerable children and families access timely nutrition support and improve child well-being. As a civil society actor in the nutrition space, World Vision contributes community-level evidence, learning and practical experience to the broader SUN movement, helping amplify effective approaches and strengthen collective action to address malnutrition.