Infant feeding guidelines emphasize that breast milk is the best nutrition for infants.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers and practitioners must learn from mistakes made during the HIV pandemic, when breastfeeding was undermined through isolating infants from their mothers, and formula feeding resulted in more infant deaths than the disease.

Breastfeeding is one of the best buys in global health to improve social, health, and economic development outcomes. Globally, improving breastfeeding practices could save more than 820,000 lives annually—87 percent of them infants under six months of age.

A billion dollars and two thousand lives, every day. This impactful study, which is the foundation for Alive and Thrive’s online tool, examines the human and economic costs of not breastfeeding.

The Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly (BBF) initiative provides a guide for countries to assess the enabling environment for breastfeeding policies, programs and scale-up.