In 2015, the Ethiopian government signed the Seqota Declaration, a high-level political commitment to end stunting in Ethiopian children under two by 2030. The country’s existing nutrition programme was failing to deliver on promises of collaboration across the various federal ministries and local-government levels involved and, as a result, the different sectors were sometimes even working at cross purposes.

The implementation of the Seqota Declaration was intended to address this lack of collaboration and be multisectoral, although the Programme Delivery Unit was housed at the Ministry of Health and several other sectors believed Health was continuing to dominate the nutrition landscape. Then, just a year into the 15-year programme, one senior minister stopped attending the fortnightly meetings. With limited resources available for implementing the declaration and with the different sectors having many issues vying for their time, this case study asks students to consider how to ensure political buy-in for this supposedly multisectoral endeavour.