World Diabetes Day 2026: Laying the foundation for early action

Starting early

At the World Diabetes Foundation (WDF), we approach early action through a life course lens, focusing on primary prevention and health promotion. Pregnancy, infancy, and childhood are where prevention can begin, and we work alongside our partners to use them as entry points for diabetes prevention. 

Early action can begin before a child is born. Pregnancy is where this starts for many families: screening connects women to care, while prevention looks towards healthier futures for both mother and child. For 15 years, Fundación Vida Nueva has worked in Colombia to integrate noncommunicable disease (NCD) prevention into antenatal care and screening services, with a particular focus on gestational diabetes. Community health workers help women screened for hyperglycaemia in pregnancy access care and continue supporting them afterwards. The work also reaches schools, where healthy living and malnutrition prevention become part of the school day.

The same focus on early action for children and families runs through our work on malnutrition in all its forms: undernutrition, overweight and obesity, and nutrient deficiencies. These can exist side by side, even within the same community or household, so prevention needs to support good nutrition, not weight alone. Our partners contribute through maternal and child health interventions, from pregnancy and postpartum care to services delivered through health systems, alongside organisations working across sectors. Schools are where this approach meets daily life: they reach children regularly and at scale.

In Nepal, school gardens turned that reach into something practical. By growing vegetables, harvesting them and cooking with them, children put what they learned into practice. The change carried into the classroom, where teachers wove health education and physical activity into daily lessons, and beyond the school gates, as parents joined nutritious cooking classes and activities reached other family members. Healthy living became something children and their families could do together, not a topic confined to a lesson.

In Santa Catarina, Brazil, young people from Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities are reviving traditional cooking and agroecological food production through Cultiva, a new initiative led by Usina de Imaginação. Community gardens grow region-specific food and medicinal plants, while children and youth make participatory films on nutrition and community life, collecting and sharing food traditions along the way. As communities grow more of their own fresh, local produce, appetite for traditional food returns. Their food environment is changing, and with it the prospect that demand for healthier food can make the healthy option the default one.

Building early action into systems

Community action matters, but it cannot carry the whole load. “We can’t ask people to make healthy choices if those choices are not available, affordable, and accessible,” says Elsa Morandat, WDF Associate Director, Policy and Programme. 

Supporting healthy environments matters. The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health identified obesity, and obesity-related conditions such as diabetes, as one of the 17 major threats to human health, responsible for an estimated 23.1 billion disability-adjusted life years lost between 2025 and 2100. Yet the Commission underlined that this burden can be avoided through effective policy.

Healthy choices are shaped well beyond the household. What is served and taught in schools, how food is produced, priced, and marketed, and where health services are located all decide what is realistic for a family. For low-income families, affordability and access often determine whether advice can become action. Policy sets those conditions; the health and education systems that already reach families are where they take effect, which is why prevention has to be built into them rather than left to households alone.

Another WDF supported project, the Pacific Ending Childhood Obesity initiative, or P-ECHO, shows what this looks like in practice. It integrates childhood obesity surveillance and diabetes prevention across primary healthcare and education in Fiji, Nauru, Niue, Vanuatu, and Wallis and Futuna.

Bringing sectors together

None of this sits within a single ministry. Health, education, agriculture, and finance all shape the conditions for early action. “Given the extent of the challenges, we need to bring partners and sectors together to work on building health-promoting environments that allow for early action,” Elsa adds. That is WDF’s role: connecting community experience with expertise in policy, food systems, and healthcare, and helping create the conversations and partnerships that can turn shared priorities into action.

Convening these sectors was the aim of our side event during the 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva, co-hosted with the International Diabetes Federation and the World Obesity Federation. A discussion about childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes widened to food systems, schools, maternal health, physical activity, and primary healthcare, and connected national policy with children’s daily lives.

Simón Barquera of the World Obesity Federation described Mexico’s sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, front-of-pack warning labels, and legislation banning sugary beverages and ultra-processed foods in schools. Hun Jeudyla of Cambodia’s Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport turned to schools and their surroundings, describing efforts to restrict harmful food sales and advertising alongside work to promote physical activity and healthier diets.

Both put the emphasis on changing the conditions around families, not on asking them to change on their own. Addressing obesity and type 2 diabetes depends on policies that shape what they eat, learn, and do every day, with health, education, and food systems pulling in the same direction.

From community experience to national policy

Early action needs the connection between community action and systems change to run both ways. Policies shape access to healthy food, screening, and care; experience from communities and frontline services can reveal what works and inform national policy.

Our longstanding partnerships in Sierra Leone are informing guidelines, the efforts to address diabetes in pregnancy rippling out of the clinics. Experience from service delivery contributed to the development of a national protocol for gestational diabetes and the country’s first strategic NCD plan, carrying lessons from the frontline into the wider health system.

A Technical Working Group was established to support the integration of NCD policies, and the nationally endorsed protocol for hyperglycaemia in pregnancy is now being put into practice. At the same time, diabetes and hypertension services are moving further into primary healthcare, creating stronger links between pregnancy care, prevention, and longer-term NCD management.

The result is a reinforcing cycle: experience in antenatal clinics informs national guidance, which in turn helps strengthen care closer to where people live. With each step, there is greater scope to reach women and communities sooner, making earlier detection and action part of how the health system works rather than something added later.