With a career rooted in systems change and global equity, Matt Freeman has led initiatives across the philanthropic, nonprofit, and public sectors to advance nutrition, gender justice, and climate resilience. Now serving as Executive Director of Stronger Foundations for Nutrition, he works to unite private funders around a shared vision for tackling malnutrition as a cross-cutting global challenge. From shaping partnership strategies at USAID to directing programmatic efforts at Girl Effect and One Acre Fund, Matt brings a rare blend of operational insight and policy acumen. We spoke with him about the values that have guided his leadership, the urgency of integrated action on health and sustainability, and how ethical leadership — including his long-standing advocacy for gender equity — can help shift power and deepen impact in today’s development landscape.
We’d love to start by learning more about your professional journey. Can you share more about how you got to your current position with Stronger Foundations for Nutrition, including some pivotal moments that shaped your path?
I first started in international development at USAID through the Presidential Management Fellowship program. I was responsible for everything from facilitating donor meetings for the Administrator with ministers or heads of state during UNGA, to setting up policy dialogues between departments and their counterparts in other donor governments. It was a crash course in global development, and since my role was for partnership support rather than technical support, I got to work across all sectors—health, development, climate. That proved to be a great introduction to everything.
After a few years, I moved into nutrition for the first time, joining the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, or GAIN, starting out in their newly established DC office, and later moving to their headquarters in Geneva. My original mandate was to help build out a business development function, but I quickly evolved into a more programmatic role.
From there, I had the opportunity to join the Nike Foundation as it worked to spin out a new entity - the Girl Effect. This was my introduction to working for girls’ and women’s empowerment— with the mandate of using funds from Nike Foundation and other donors to attract additional resources to invest in women and girls. But because of changes in leadership, I quickly inherited the General Manager role, and shifted into programming—overseeing country teams, the gender team, and the core strategy.
After that, I joined One Acre Fund, one of the largest social enterprises working with African smallholder farmers, where I lead innovative partnerships. That was my most recent role before this one at Stronger Foundations. Coming back to nutrition has felt really natural. I already knew the technical side, the stakeholders, the systemic challenges. But now I also have this broader operational background, and experience with behavior change and social norms from Girl Effect. Being fluent in those other dimensions—gender, climate, food systems—really helps in what I do now.
“You cannot overstate it: the links between nutrition and gender outcomes—and between nutrition and climate—are deeply interconnected. The burden of malnutrition falls disproportionately on women and girls. At the same time, food systems drive about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a long list of evidence-based reasons to treat these as integration priorities.”
- Matt Freeman on the intersection of gender, climate, and nutrition
Matt Freeman at a CSW event co-hosted by BKMF, Stronger Foundations for Nutrition, and OECD NetFWD at the BKMF Office.
Talk to us about the work of Stronger Foundations for Nutrition. Why are coordinated efforts among global philanthropic institutions so needed at this time on the topic of nutrition? What are some of your key wins to date, and what remains on your agenda?
Stronger Foundations is the philanthropic community for global malnutrition—it’s the only network that exists with that specific mandate. Our role is to be the connective tissue between private funders, and to grow the overall amount of philanthropic funding going to impactful nutrition interventions.
What that really means is figuring out, across a space that’s very diverse and honestly quite fragmented, how to bring different institutions together—to share information, share opportunities, avoid duplication, and increase synergy across health, food, and social protection systems. Historically, there have been very few private or public funders treating nutrition as a priority sector strategy and that has led to limited funds and a real need to attract a broader set of stakeholders. In many ways, our reason to exist feels more important than ever, especially now, when resources are tight and the pressures on global malnutrition are only increasing.
In terms of wins, I’d say our biggest successes have been the growth of the network itself, and the increase in philanthropic capital flowing to nutrition. At the recent Nutrition for Growth Summit in Paris—which the Ban Ki-moon Foundation was a part of—we convened 10 private funders who collectively announced over $2 billion in new multi-year commitments to nutrition, spanning the full spectrum of malnutrition—from child survival, to broader child development, to the intersection of food systems and climate change through interventions like universal school meals. That $2 billion is more than twice what was committed at the previous Nutrition for Growth in Tokyo in 2021, back when we were just getting started. So it's a strong signal—not just about our work, but about the growing momentum in philanthropy for nutrition more broadly.
We’re also starting to see some great examples of collaboration across sectors. One that stands out is the nexus of immunization and nutrition. Recent partnerships between the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the vaccine alliance Gavi, and between the Eleanor Crook Foundation and Gavi, show what is possible when we apply a child-centered lens to delivering integrated services. That’s the kind of cross-sector alignment we’re excited to support.
Looking ahead, our focus is on keeping up the drumbeat for nutrition—making sure it stays visible, and pushing for more collective action on key issues, especially child wasting, which is the most severe form of malnutrition. Ultimately, our goal is to save as many lives as possible.
Stronger Foundations for Nutrition, alongside the Ban Ki-moon Foundation and the OECD, has recently engaged in conversations with field leaders to break down silos between funders currently working separately on issues of malnutrition, gender equity, and climate justice. Why is better integration across these issues so important?
From the very beginning, we’ve prioritized gender and climate as key cross-cutting themes within nutrition. You cannot overstate it: the links between nutrition and gender outcomes—and between nutrition and climate—are deeply interconnected. The burden of malnutrition falls disproportionately on women and girls. At the same time, food systems drive about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a long list of evidence-based reasons to treat these as integration priorities.
And yet, in nutrition philanthropy—and frankly in nutrition programming and policy more broadly—these issues haven’t really been mainstreamed or reflected in actual policy decisions, investment strategies, or even the indicators we use to measure progress. It’s often assumed that if you’re doing something in agriculture or nutrition, women and girls will benefit by default. But we know that’s just not the case.
So, a couple of years ago, we made a major investment and created a set of resources under the banner of Nourish Equality to help funders mainstream gender into nutrition grantmaking. We also mapped out evidence for how investments in areas like women’s economic empowerment, girls’ education, or gender-based violence prevention can lead to better nutrition outcomes. There are real best practices here—and real opportunities to act on them.
We’ve done similar work on the climate side, looking across the food value chain and identifying specific investment strategies by food category. So, for instance, if you’re looking at protein-rich foods or fruits and vegetables, here’s how you should be thinking about things like cold chains or emissions.
The deeper we go into this work, the more we realize that the venn diagram of these two tracks - gender and climate - overlaps far more than it diverges. When you center women and girls, and focus on climate resilience alongside mitigation, you start to see a very powerful, unifying strategy emerge.
That’s why it’s been so meaningful for us to partner with the Ban Ki-moon Foundation and the OECD. We’re each bringing strengths from different sectors—nutrition, gender, climate—and trying to create a shared conversation. We see this as an opportunity to not just think about what we do as nutrition, or as gender, or as climate, but to act as a single community pursuing these three outcomes together—because they are so mutually reinforcing. That’s the real win we’re trying to build on.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have served as a shared framework for global action. As we approach 2030, how do you assess their influence on the nutrition space? What should a post-2030 agenda prioritize to ensure that health and nutrition are more effectively integrated into global policy frameworks?
So I’m obviously very biased, but I truly believe there’s strong evidence that nutrition is one of the most foundational investments you can make to drive progress across the SDGs.
It’s directly tied to SDG 2, of course—ending hunger and malnutrition. That’s where the primary indicator on malnutrition lives. But when you step back, it becomes clear just how far-reaching the impacts of malnutrition are. For example, malnutrition is the number one underlying cause of child mortality—contributing to nearly half of all child deaths. So how do you achieve SDG 3 on health and well-being if you’re not addressing malnutrition?
We’ve already talked about the connections with SDG 5 on gender—those are very explicit. But you can go even further. Take SDG 1 on poverty: in terms of long-term economic development, malnutrition is probably one of the biggest constraints. It directly affects both physical and cognitive development, limiting human capital potential. There are analyses that show countries lose more than 3 percent of their GDP annually due to malnutrition. On the flip side, the return on investment in nutrition can be as high as 23 to 1—making it one of the smartest investments you can make.
So if you go SDG by SDG, the case for nutrition just gets stronger. And that brings me to my main critique of the current SDG framework: it positions malnutrition only within the hunger goal, rather than acknowledging its relevance to so many other goals. Moreover, certain nutrition outcomes affect not only lower income countries, but also high-income countries—issues like overnutrition and anemia for example. In reality, nutrition underpins a huge part of the global development agenda. It’s a shared responsibility, not a standalone issue.
For the post-2030 agenda, I’d love to see more emphasis on these kinds of cross-cutting enablers and creating collective opportunities for progress. We need to design global frameworks that reflect the interconnected nature of development. Treating nutrition as a siloed sector does it a disservice. It’s not just about food—it’s about survival, health, equity, and growth.
“I fear that far too many leaders are okay with incremental progress. They’re willing to be held back by how our systems work. They accept certain things as a given—like the idea that there just isn’t enough money, so we have to make trade-offs and compromises. That kind of logic, to me, is faulty. We need leaders who are determined to challenge that and not say that it can’t be done… So for me, ethical leadership in the 21st century has to be about combining that humanity, compassion, and the true spirit of empathy with a deep refusal to accept unjust systems as unchangeable. It’s got to be both.”
- Matt Freeman on Leadership
Matt Freeman speakling at the Nutrition for Growth Summit in Paris.
You’ve worked across sectors - from bilateral donors to NGOs to private initiatives. How has this influenced your view of leadership? In your opinion, what does ethical leadership in the 21st century look like and require?
So I put it into two big buckets in my mind. The first is about a commitment to radical, transformational change—and not being accepting of the status quo, or of a world where change doesn’t happen. Because the world we live in is deeply unjust. When you talk about malnutrition, you're potentially talking about upwards of half the planet—people who are being held back from reaching their full potential. And we can’t live in a world where that’s acceptable.
I fear that far too many leaders are okay with incremental progress. They’re willing to be held back by how our systems work. They accept certain things as a given—like the idea that there just isn’t enough money, so we have to make trade-offs and compromises. That kind of logic, to me, is faulty. We need leaders who are determined to challenge that and not say that it can’t be done.
And then the other bucket for me is about being a compassionate human being. This is where I feel like so many fall far short. They don’t respect other human beings and their fundamental rights. They don’t acknowledge that people exist outside the work environment and all the pressures they may be carrying. We need so much more empathy.
But I think there’s also a positive side to that story, which is that even in these massive, complex institutions, it’s people who make things happen or who don’t. If you’re not connecting at an individual level, nothing else really works. And that’s just as true at the community level. We’re not talking about abstract systems—we’re talking about real families, real mothers and fathers making decisions for real children who are going to school with real teachers.
And I don’t think we approach our work that way often enough. We don’t respect people’s lived truths in that way. So for me, ethical leadership in the 21st century has to be about combining that humanity, compassion, and the true spirit of empathy with a deep refusal to accept unjust systems as unchangeable. It’s got to be both.
In terms of gender equity, what does meaningful male allyship look like to you? How have you personally sought to embody that in your career - was there a defining experience that solidified your commitment to gender equity?
I’ll happily wear the badge of a male ally with honor, you can definitely put that title next to my name. If I had to choose something outside of nutrition to champion, it would be women and girls. I’ve spent many years of my professional life focused on gender equality, and in my personal life, this has always been close to home. My parents divorced when I was young, so I was raised by two mothers. I have two sisters. And now, I have a daughter. So in really all parts of my life, this is something I think about a lot.
My role at Girl Effect was a huge gift. I’ve always been passionate about that personally, but I never thought I’d get to work on it professionally. I came into that role with a lot of passion, but without the language or a deep understanding of the structural issues. And I remember being really struck as I started learning about power, agency, and structural inequity. Every time I encountered a new concept, it was mind-blowing. It gave me a whole new way of seeing the world. Before that, I hadn’t really had the tools to think deeply about why things are the way they are.
Now, I carry that awareness into every interaction. Whenever I’m working with women or girls, I can’t help but think about how many of them didn’t have an easy path laid out for them—whether it’s their education, the social norms they grew up with, or the way they were received in the workplace, especially as young women. I’ve had so many staff over the years go on maternity leave and I’ve come to appreciate how challenging it is to navigate that, and then return to the workforce.
That constant awareness ties back to what I said earlier about the importance of humanity. These are real stories, lived by real people—and in this case, by half the planet. I don’t know how you can overlook that.
Once you begin to understand how much of this is shaped by basic normative views, about what a woman is supposed to do or what a man is supposed to do, it becomes really clear that men have to step up. We have to push back. No one gets to define what my wife should do for our children, or what I should do. We are both parents, and we both should be parenting equally.
So for me, this shows up in every part of my life and work. We need to create the conditions for equal footing. And once we have that, of course we want the best and brightest to rise. But we don’t live in a world that offers that equal footing yet—and until we do, we’ve got a responsibility to help build it.
What is your call to action to global leaders across sectors - including private sector, philanthropy, at the UN and other multilateral institutions - to address global malnutrition?
“Once you begin to understand how much of this is shaped by basic normative views, about what a woman is supposed to do or what a man is supposed to do, it becomes really clear that men have to step up. We have to push back. We need to create the conditions for equal footing. And once we have that, of course we want the best and brightest to rise. But we don’t live in a world that offers that equal footing yet—and until we do, we’ve got a responsibility to help build it.”
- Matt Freeman on Gender Equity.
Matt Freeman with BKMF Executive Director Kate Landon and Bathylle Missika (OECD NetFWD) at the Nutrition for Growth Summit in Paris.
I would say that nutrition is absolutely foundational to any outcome that any of these stakeholders, in any sector, wants to achieve. And by ensuring that they view their work through the lens of whether this is better or worse for human health and nutrition, they can have an incredible impact on their own work and on the work of every one of their peers.
What I’m really struck by—and I would hope that they could be struck by it as well—is that we don’t have separate systems for every single thing we need to do in order to lift people out of poverty, for them to be healthy, and for them to have an equal chance at prosperity. In every location there’s only one health system—whether it’s a community health worker or a primary health facility. There’s not a separate one for nutrition. There’s only one school system. There’s only one set of markets where people buy and sell what they grow on the one plot of land they farm.
So the idea that we can make decisions about how to optimize that land, or that school, or that health facility, without thinking about how to improve the quality of nutrition is very short-sighted. Because there’s no other route to delivering those outcomes except through those same systems.
And all of them—every single one I just mentioned—are under incredible strain. Every pot of money that we don’t take advantage of, or every meaningful policy that we don’t champion to strengthen these systems is a missed opportunity.
My call to action? Mainstream, mainstream, mainstream. I think that’s the core.
As you reflect on your work and the road ahead, are there any guiding principles or approaches you believe deserve more attention in how we tackle complex global challenges?
There are two approaches or concepts I’m very passionate about.
First, systems: we need to be thinking with a systems lens and appreciating the interconnection of and the power within systems because that’s how change actually works. Not through projectizing everything or focusing on short term outcomes.
And then the other is innovation. Not just technology, but it can also be innovation in how we work. We need to try being more radical in how we partner and create efficiencies, how we break silos and create new points of access that we may not even imagine are possible because we all work in isolation. Innovation can also mean taking things that we do know work and scaling them, at the same time being okay with the fact that we may not have the full basket yet, and the full way of delivering that basket yet.
Former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has long advocated for sustainable, inclusive development. What does his leadership and legacy mean to you?
He was the Secretary-General when I began my work at USAID. So from the very beginning, as I was learning about global development and multilateralism —he’s the person I associated with that brighter version of the world.
He was also the Secretary-General during the creation of the Scaling Up Nutrition movement, which is the UN’s dedicated initiative to address global malnutrition and support countries in their efforts to improve nutrition. So I’ve associated him with that agenda from the start as well.
To me, he represents what multilateralism as well as multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder actions could be at its best. It is what we need now more than ever, and I’ll always consider him the original champion of that kind of leadership.
What message would you share with the next generation of global leaders—young people inspired to drive change in health, equity, and sustainability?
To any young person I would say: believe that change can happen, and that it can happen with urgency. We don't need to be talking about a change that takes decades, especially in the world that we live in now with the way that technology is transforming the world so quickly. The world is closer together, even though it feels so far apart, and we are all connected like never before. The right decisions by the right people tomorrow could dramatically create positive change.
And I would also say lead with integrity and with authenticity. That’s critical. When people feel the most important thing is to posture and to talk about the things they don’t actually understand, and to use big words for the sake of it - they lose sight of why we’re all doing the work that we are actually doing. Be here as a real person with real views. When faced with things you don’t know, defer to people who do.