Strengthening the capacity for multisectoral and multi-stakeholder collaboration at all levels is a core objective of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement. In 2017, both the SUN Movement Secretariat (SMS) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) independently initiated the development of functional capacity building programmes for SUN and Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Focal Points. Given the complementary goals of their two initiatives, SMS and IFPRI decided to join forces to develop a functional capacity-strengthening programme covering SUN countries, simultaneously offered to SUN and CAADP Focal Points and their teams in participating African countries. DFID-funded Maximising the Quality of Scaling up Nutrition Plus (MQSUN+) has been supporting this initiative in partnership with SMS, IFPRI and Nutrition International. This brief highlights the results of a functional capacity gap assessment that was carried out by MQSUN+ to inform this programme.