Nutrition – C4D Network

2018 Global Food Policy Report (IFPRI, 2018)

May 8, 2018 By C4D Network

IFPRI’s flagship report reviews the major food policy issues, developments, and decisions of 2017, and highlights challenges and opportunities for 2018 at the global and regional levels. This year’s report looks at the impacts of greater global integration—including the movement of goods, investment, people, and knowledge—and the threat of current antiglobalization pressures. Drawing on recent research, IFPRI researchers and other distinguished food policy experts consider a range of topics including:

■ How can the global food system deliver food security for all in the face of the radical changes taking place today?

■ Do voluntary and involuntary migration increase or decrease food security in source countries and host countries?

■ How can global governance structures better address problems of food security and nutrition?

Click here for full report

People Centred Advocacy for a more Sustainable Food System (IIED Toolkit, 2018)

May 6, 2018 By C4D Network

Fostering civic action and agency to ensure that citizens have voice and choice in relation to the food they eat is vital. However, food systems are complex and many actors help shape and influence them at local, national and international levels. By lobbying from the grassroots up, systemic changes to food systems can be made in order to address local and national challenges. This toolkit aims to provide essential guidance and ideas to advocacy professionals and civil society organisations wishing to mobilise and support low-income citizen groups to advocate for improved diets. It is ideal for civil society organisations that work with those most affected and neglected by food policy, low income consumers, producers, traders, processers and vendors – the people who form the backbone of informal food systems, but whose needs are rarely factored in by policy makers.

Click here for full toolkit.

The Power of People-Centered Nutrition Interventions (Chapter 4.2 of Good Nutrition: Perspectives for the 21st Century, Karger e-book, 2016)

April 7, 2018 By C4D Network

The process of understanding nutrition related problems, and of developing appropriate solutions – i.e., design thinking – can be quite challenging. In fact, there are far more examples of public health solutions that ignore the end-user than of ones that are built with the end-user in mind. For this very reason, the goal of this chapter is to convey the relevance of people-centered design to nutrition interventions, and to share some strategies for putting people at the heart of nutrition interventions.

The chapter uses case studies to consider the role of participatory photography, and grandmothers and indigenous knowledge systems in nutrition interventions.

Click here for full chapter.

Dial ‘N’ for Nutrition? A Landscape Analysis of What We Know About m-Nutrition, m-Agriculture and m-Development (IDS Working Paper 481, 2017)

March 3, 2018 By C4D Network Editor

Child undernutrition is one of the most devastating realities in many parts of the world. Globally in 2015, 159 million children below the age of five years were too short for their age (stunted) and 50 million were too thin for their height (wasted). Inadequate nutrition in early childhood can have lifelong consequences, including poor physical and psychological health, and low educational attainment and employment opportunities.

Behaviour change of child carers is central to the effectiveness of many interventions addressing child undernutrition. For example, early and exclusive breastfeeding and the complementary feeding of infants between six and 23 months requires changes in feeding, caring and playing with children, as well as changes in the types and frequency of foods consumed and their preparation.

Agriculture is probably the sector with the most studies on the effectiveness of nutrition-sensitive interventions. For agriculture to become more nutrition sensitive, choices will need to be made about who controls resources, which crops and animals are farmed, the types of storage and processing patterns adopted, and the metrics used to assess interventions. All of these changes are embedded in long cultural traditions and are not necessarily straightforward to change.

The purpose of this paper is to assist would-be implementers and evaluators to understand the landscape they are operating in, so they can design nutrition and agriculture interventions that stand the greatest chance of working, and evaluation designs that stand the greatest chance of finding answers rigorously.

Nutrition Knowledge Bank (GSMA mNutrition Initiative that provides advice via mobile phones)

April 29, 2017 By C4D Network Editor

A new open-access Knowledge Bank aims to deliver nutrition information to three million people in 12 developing countries.

The Knowledge Bank, part of the GSMA mNutrition initiative to help tackle malnutrition in Africa and Asia, is a collection of content on good nutritional practices and includes downloadable factsheets and mobile messages.

Adequate nutrition is critical to the physical and mental development of children and to long-term human health, but one out of three people in developing countries suffers from micronutrient deficiency. Experts consider poor access to agricultural and health information a major barrier to the uptake of improved nutritional practises, particularly by women and vulnerable groups in marginalized areas.

mNutrition delivers content to people at risk of malnutrition in Bangladesh, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. An expert consortium on nutritional matters—BMJ, CABI, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and Oxfam International—is partnering with local organizations in these countries to produce useful and reliable nutritional, agricultural and health information, which is then distributed through mobile phone networks in each country.

The Nutrition Knowledge Bank is searchable by country and subject. The messages and factsheets are available in several local languages and take into account the differing cultural contexts. The topics covered include breastfeeding advice for new mothers, practical tips for rearing dairy cows and growing healthier crops for human consumption.