Nutrition – C4D Network

Let’s Make it Work! Breastfeeding in the Workplace – Using C4D to make breastfeeding possible among working mothers (UNICEF, 2018)

October 29, 2018

In 2016, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UNICEF launched two country-level initiatives to improve breastfeeding practices of infants of working mothers, in partnership with businesses operating in two distinct settings:

• Ready-made garment (RMG) factory sites located in the urban and peri-urban areas of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
• A vast tea estate situated in Kericho County, Kenya.

The objective of the mother- and babyfriendly workplace initiatives is to increase working mothers’ demand for and access to facilities and services that support appropriate breastfeeding practices and care in the workplace.” In doing so, the initiatives aim to generate evidence on the operational feasibility, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of supporting breastfeeding in the workplace, and to showcase its benefits for children, families, communities and businesses. UNICEF applied the Communication for Development (C4D) process to design social and behavioural change communication strategies to increase acceptance of, and demand for, workplace breastfeeding programmes in each context.

This document presents accomplishments to date and conceptual thinking in C4D for promoting breastfeeding support in the workplace, emanating from these two experiences and building upon available evidence and lessons learned from former experiences. The document
is intended for programme planners within UNICEF as well as UNICEF partner organizations.

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2018 Global Food Policy Report (IFPRI, 2018)

May 8, 2018

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?

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

May 6, 2018

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

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.

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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

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.

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