The Global Health Science and Practice Technical Exchange (GHTechX) is an annual event for the global health community sharing state-of-the-art evidence-based best practices and information through a variety of technical sessions.
The 2021 GHTechX will span four days from April 21 – 24, 2021 and will be completely virtual. The agenda incorporates concurrent sessions from global health technical tracks including, but not limited to health systems, HIV/AIDS, family planning and reproductive health, and maternal, newborn, and child health.
GAIN will host two sessions on Thursday 22 April.
Strengthening private sector accountability and engagement to improve the diets of infants and young children
Thursday 22 April at 8:00am EDT.
Good nutrition is critical for achieving and maintaining a healthy life. For infants and young children, high-quality diets serve as the foundation for growth, physical and mental development, and protection from disease. Commercially produced complementary foods are widely available in many low- and middle-income countries. However, few meet the nutrition requirements of young children and concerns remain about their nutritional quality marketing, labelling and safety. This session will discuss the need to improve these aspects of these products, for strengthened regulation enactment and compliance, and how engagement with the private sector is one avenue to improving access to appropriate, nutritious complementary foods.
Reflections on approaches to engage adolescents for influencing food choices – learnings from programmatic experiences in Bangladesh and Indonesia
Thursday 22 April at 9:15am EDT
Most of the 1.3 billion people aged between 10 and 19 years live in low-income and middle-income countries, where suboptimal conditions can lead to unrealized benefit for socioeconomic growth, health and well-being. According to the 2016 Lancet Commission on Adolescent Health and Wellbeing, investing in adolescents yields a triple dividend—in the present day, into their adulthood, and through to the next generation of children. Efforts to engage and enable adolescents to participate in decision making are needed if we seek to unveil the transformative potential of youth.
This session aims to discuss the theoretical underpinning of social movements and youth mentorship and how these approaches have been used for engaging adolescents in making better food choices, reflecting on the experiences from two campaigns - the Bhalo Khabo Bhalo Thakbo ("Eat Well, Live Well") and Saya Pemberani ("I’m Courageous") in Bangladesh and Indonesia, respectively. In particular, we will discuss how the social movement approach in Bangladesh and youth mentorship in Indonesia aimed to
- identify and frame a nutrition problem that reflected the lived reality of adolescents’ experiences, including their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic; and
- support adolescents in identifying context-appropriate solutions to the problem.