Our global food system has shaped societal preferences in favour of consuming unhealthy and unsustainable foods, fuelling poor health and accelerating climate change. We need radical, accelerated transformation in our consumption habits across society to combat this. Food culture impacts the way society thinks and feels about and values certain foods, and it has a profound impact on consumption habits. Yet, food culture remains unexplored and underutilised.
The Food Culture Alliance has been established with a single vision – a world where society’s preference is for nutritious and sustainable foods. Our mission is to champion food culture and leverage the toolbox of strategies it provides to shift preferences and increase society’s demand for nutritious and sustainable foods.
The Food Culture Alliance framework provides further information on the social and cultural strategies the alliance aims to deploy.
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The Food Culture Alliance secretariat is hosted by GAIN and co-led by EAT and the Global Business School Network. We are establishing Alliances in Kenya, India, and Indonesia.
Our 3-pillar operating model is set to deliver on the Food Culture Alliance’s mission:
Visit the Food Culture Alliance website for further information on our approach and work. The Food Culture Alliance is a key component of the Consumer Demand Generation Programme.
Programme Lead, Consumer Demand Generation
Senior Associate, Food Culture Alliance
Millions of people around the world struggle to afford minimally nutritious diets, and social protection is critical for making healthy diets accessible. GAIN supports governments and other key stakeholders to accelerate system innovations that can make social protection investments work harder for the nutrition of the most vulnerable.
Through partnerships, policy advocacy, and programmes, GAIN is working in seven countries to make social protection systems more nutrition-sensitive and better equipped to combat systemic and intergenerational inequities that limit the reach of vital services.
GAIN's social protection programme currently encompasses the following synergistic work areas:
GAIN's work in these areas seeks to improve both the delivery and effective utilisation of nutrition services in social protection systems, ensuring that recipients attain the intended nutritional benefits. We believe that improving the delivery and utilisation of nutrition-sensitive social protection is key to achieving longer-term dietary resilience for the most vulnerable households.
Our social protection programme is rooted in four guiding principles: gender sensitivity, human centeredness, sustainability, and climate-awareness. These principles serve as lenses through which we view our work, and to which we hold ourselves accountable.
Technical Officer
For over ten years, GAIN has been supporting micro-, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in nutritious food value chains to grow, innovate, and meet the needs of vulnerable consumers.
Over 1000 MSMEs have been supported across nearly all of GAIN’s programme countries and covering input suppliers, primary producers, distributors and wholesalers, as well as retailers. Some example beneficiary companies are featured HERE.
GAIN’s support has included basic business development services, technical assistance for food safety, processing and product formulation, marketing and the like, as well as financial assistance in the form of small grants. (Our non-grant financial support is covered under Nutritious Food Financing). Four big projects delivered these interventions:
Implemented in Mozambique, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania from 2013 to 2020, GAIN’s Marketplace for Nutritious Foods Programme focused on supporting SMEs in nutritious food value chains to develop profitable business models and sustainably bring nutritious and safe foods to markets. The Marketplace’s two-pronged approach supports a broad network of stakeholders with information and knowledge, through the “Community of Practice”, while targeted technical and financial support offers promising, innovative enterprises through the “Innovation Accelerator”.
“Keeping Food Markets Working” (KFMW) was set up as an emergency response programme to protect and sustain food systems in the face of COVID-19. It provided rapid support to food system workers, SMEs supplying nutritious foodsThe 18 months rapid response supported SMEs in Nigeria, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
In 2016, GAIN and its partners spotted a gap in postharvest loss interventions targeted to a) nutritious foods and b) working in the supply chain beyond the farm. The Postharvest Loss Alliance for Nutrition (PLAN) was launched in Nigeria. While a significant amount of food loss occurs on-farm, many agriculture organisations are making progress with farmers to reduce these losses. PLAN added value by supporting SMEs post-farmgate in Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Nigeria over 5 years (2016 – 2020). It brought together public and private sector actors to collectively reduce loss of nutritious foods, boosting livelihoods of suppliers while increasing availability and affordability of nutritious and safe foods for consumers.
Through the Nutrition Impact at Scale (NIS) Project, GAIN partners with Enterprise Support Organisations (ESOs) to scale the impact of its work to increase access to safe and nutritious foods, especially for low-income consumers. Funded by The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands over five years (January 2022 – December 2026), the project uses a Market Systems Development approach to improve food systems, increase inclusivity, and ultimately, nutrition outcomes. It leverages the extensive experience GAIN has developed over the years of providing quality technical assistance, networking, knowledge sharing, building capacity of partners, and the provision of various tools and resources to Small and Medium Businesses (SMEs)to attach a ‘nutrition lens’ to the work of ESOs Nigeria, Benin, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Kenya
While Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) play a substantial role in bringing foods to market, their success is hindered by several constraints, including a lack of financial and technical capacity to improve and grow their businesses.
Most of the food that is produced, processed, transported, and sold in the Global South is handled by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). While SMEs play a substantial role in bringing foods to market, their success is hindered by several constraints, including a lack of financial and technical capacity to improve and grow their businesses. Women-led enterprises face additional constraints, as there is a large gender gap in access to business finance across many world regions, exacerbating the already challenging act of securing financing for a business in the agri-food sector.
According to the IFC, the estimated global gap in SME funding is $5.7 trillion. "Owners and entrepreneurs report access to capital to be one of their toughest challenges, one that sometimes outranks electricity shortages and other concerns". Without sufficient access to financial services, SMEs are unable to expand operations and market reach, enhance the nutritional value of their products, improve on their food safety standards or start working more sustainably.
Further, there is a lack of awareness within investment communities on the importance of nutrition and of the additional impact that nutrition investing can contribute to, beyond SDG2, including gender equality, children growth and development.
To ensure that all people can access a safe, healthy and diverse diet, there is need for: i) global influencing on nutrition investing; and ii) innovative methods of resource mobilisation that focus on nutrition and SMEs.
Through our global influencing work, we aim to improve awareness, capacity, and commitment among investors to support the development of nutrition as an investment theme. Our goal is to scale the impact of our work , seeking to influence others (investors, donors, governments, and Development Finance Institutions (DFIs)) to adopt a nutrition lens to the work that they’re doing. We will lead on evidence-based advocacy on the link between gender and nutrition in the investment space, as well as child lens and nutrition investing. We will also leverage the approaches and learnings from the Nutritious Foods Financing Facility - N3F.
The N3F is an innovative blended finance approach that aims to overcome SMEs' constraints by providing financial support and building technical capacity within high-potential SMEs that produce foods available to lower-income consumers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The goal is to transform the capacity of these SMEs to deliver nutritious foods in Africa through a blended finance approach comprised of a financing facility with requisite technical assistance. N3F acts as a proof-of-concept, aiming to prove that financing nutritious foods through SMEs works and providing a pathway forward for larger scale transformation.
The N3F Fund: Launched in December 2023, the N3F fund is an impact-first fund with consumer nutrition at its core and a blended finance structure, which provides debt financing to SMEs providing safe and nutritious foods to local consumers in SSASSA Sub-Saharan Africa. Managed by Incofin Investment Management, with GAIN providing nutrition expertise.
Technical Assistance: Provision of technical assistance to the Fund's investee SMEs, focusing on 1) general business management practices to support SMEs to become more efficient and financially sustainable, providing assistance such as business planning and strategy development; and 2) impact enhancement and food safety, such as product formulation, labelling and supply chain strengthening, to ensure, improve and oversee SMEs’ nutrition impact, as well as gender equity and environment. Through this technical assistance, the N3F aims to help SMEs reach their potential and become more effective and efficient, thereby increasing their ability to serve domestic markets. Managed by GAIN.
Monitoring, Assessment and Learning: This component focuses on convening and influencing stakeholders, knowledge dissemination and the development and validation of metrics for targeting nutrition-sensitive investments. Managed by GAIN.
The technical assistance and monitoring, assessment and learning component are grant-funded separately from the N3F fund.
N3F is committed to financing 60 nutritious food SMEs across 15+ countries in SSA (Sub-Saharan Africa), aiming to reach between 7–10 million end consumers with safe, nutritious foods.
Beyond the N3F, we aim to explore other opportunities for innovative financing to scale nutrition impact, i.e. outcome-based financing and incentive-based impact-linked finance.
Senior Lead, Innovative Finance for Nutrition
Manager, Nutritious Foods Financing (N3F) Technical Assistance and Innovative Finance
The SUN Business Network (SBN), is the private sector platform of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement and aims to support businesses to integrate and improve nutrition within the context of their country’s national nutrition priorities.
Established in 2012 and convened by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the SUN Business Network (SBN), is the private sector platform of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement and aims to support businesses to integrate and improve nutrition within the context of their country’s national nutrition priorities. The Network serves as a crucial link between the private sector, government, and other stakeholders. It mobilises businesses, especially small, and medium enterprises (SMEs), for collaborative efforts to boost private sector contributions to improved nutrition. Currently, SBN has 21 national networks across Africa and Asia, comprising 1,600 businesses voluntarily signed up as members. The development of national networks is demand-driven, which gives the SBN a ‘bottom-up’ focus and national ownership.
In the current 4-year strategy (2022 – 2025), SBN continues to reduce malnutrition in all its forms by mobilising the private sector in SUN countries to commit to and invest in improved business practices that contribute to national nutrition priorities. This will be achieved by bringing together the private sector, government, and relevant stakeholders to work with and support businesses, especially small and medium enterprises, to take joint and practical actions that shape sustainable local food systems and accelerate contributions to improved nutrition.
SBN Global Coordinator
GAIN’s Workforce Nutrition programme aims to improve the nutrition of workers and farmers in low- and middle-income countries and communities.
The programme focuses on improving access to, and demand for, healthier diets through workplaces (e.g., garment factories) or supply chains (e.g. tea estates, smallholder maize farmers). As co-convenor of the global Workforce Nutrition Alliance, GAIN brings together experts and thought leaders, provides employers with tools and resources, and curates data on best practices.
GAIN’s Workforce Nutrition programme focuses on improving access to and demand for healthier diets using existing business structures as entry points (workplaces or supply chains). Recognising that most people spend one-third of their adult lives at work, and consume at least one daily meal at the workplace, underscores the important role employers and buyers in supply chains can play in improving workers’ diets. Ideally workforce nutrition is integrated in a broader approach to worker well-being featuring living wages, women's empowerment and the promotion of healthy lifestyles.
The programme builds on evidence showing employers also benefit from effective workforce nutrition programmes. With the help of our partners, we have piloted, scaled, and evaluated nutrition interventions for workers in agricultural and industrial supply chains since 2013. Furthermore, we've developed a four-pillar framework for a successful evidence-based programme which includes: access to healthy food, breastfeeding support, nutrition related health checks with follow up dietary counselling, and nutrition education. Workforce Nutrition, being a sector agnostic programme, can be implemented at any workplace including tea estates (India, Kenya, Malawi), smallholder maize and rice farming communities (Nigeria), and garment factories (Bangladesh, Ethiopia).
Our mission is to increase everyone's access to healthy meals. Yet, as with all health-related interventions, promoting nutrition in the workplace requires identifying and addressing a variety of sociocultural factors. One of our latest working papers identifies gender as an essential factor to be considered in workforce nutrition interventions.
To consolidate learning and knowledge dissemination across various actors in this space and to scale up the actions required for transformational shifts in workplace environments globally, GAIN has partnered with the Consumer Goods Forum to establish the Workforce Nutrition Alliance. This alliance aims to reach ten million workers, smallholder farmers, supply chain workers and their families by the end of 2030. Today over 6 million workers have been reached with workforce nutrition programmes.
Learn more about Workforce Nutrition Alliance.
GAIN’s Workforce Nutrition programme has reached more than 850,000 workers, smallholder farmers and their families.
GAIN began its workforce nutrition activities in 2013 with programmes in tea and gherkins in India and Indonesia, and among sectors whose labour workforces are dominated by women. Since then, we have worked with partners designing and/or implementing programmes in the tea sector (India, Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania), cocoa sector (Ghana), garment sector (Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Pakistan), and in a variety of industry sectors (Mozambique, Indonesia).
Under the COVID-19 pandemic we have also been working with partners in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kenya and Mozambique to deliver emergency food aid grants to employers of 50,000 vulnerable workers in the food supply chain, to keep food markets working.
The Workforce Nutrition Alliance (WNA) and its partners together achieved outstanding results in 2021, the Year of Action for Nutrition. Commitments made by companies covered workers and farmers along the supply chain.
Our aim is to reach three million workers, smallholder farmers, supply chain workers and their families by the end of 2025.
Senior Advisor, Workforce Nutrition
At GAIN we consider how our work to increase access to healthy diets for all intersects with several dimensions of environmental sustainability including climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, water quality and scarcity, soil degradation and plastic waste.
In general, we aim to promote a sustainable food system which does not compromise the ability of our planet to provide nutrition for generations to come.
The current GAIN Strategy 2022 – 2027 puts environment at its core. It set out these goals:
“Engaging nature. We will design and implement our work to positively link nutrition to climate and the environment. We want to make GAIN the greenest nutrition organization both operationally and programmatically. This will make us a more responsible partner and help us accelerate advancements in nutrition outcomes”
Read about The Initiative on Climate Action and Nutrition (I-CAN)
Nutrition and the environment are deeply interconnected. Climate change, for instance, has an adverse effect on the yields and nutritional quality of major staple crops, which raises the risk of food insecurity and malnutrition. Furthermore, food systems can have a damaging impact on the environment, contributing to 80% of deforestation and one-third of greenhouse gas emissions.
In general, nutrition and food have been undervalued in the discussion on managing climate change and biodiversity, just as the nutrition community has tended to ignore sustainability issues. This is changing, in particular the framework for food shifted markedly via the 2021 Food Systems Summit which places diets, environment, climate, livelihoods and rights together for the first time in global development thinking. We also saw tentative steps to open the door to more inclusion of food and nutrition at the climate COP27 in 2022.
GAIN's Environment Strategy is built around three pillars:
Environmental considerations are incorporated into GAIN’s programmes at different levels, aiming to both ensure that all of GAIN’s work is sensitive to environmental considerations while also developing programmes which explicitly seek to address environment alongside nutrition and advance knowledge on how to do this. We consider three models for how environment is incorporated into GAIN’s programmes:
As part of GAIN’s Nourishing Food Pathways (NFP) portfolio, starting in 2023, Workstream 5 explicitly aims to align nutrition and environment goals and action. We will be working to find ways to increase access to foods, both animal and plant-based in a way which maximises nutrition impacts and minimises environmental harms in 3 countries (Indonesia, Bangladesh and Mozambique). Through this work, we aim to build knowledge and approaches which can be applied in other countries and by partners.
Several programmes within GAIN have significant positive co-benefits for environment although their primary goal is to improve access to healthy and nutritious food. For example, in Pakistan, GAIN has worked with dairy companies to develop a nutritious drink which can be produced from whey waste-streams from cheese production. Initial scoping efforts have indicated that as much as 20,000 L / day per company could be diverted, helping to increase the amount of nutritious food available, decreasing food loss without increasing the environmental footprint of production while also preventing pollution from inappropriately disposed whey.
GAIN’s Environmental Screening Tool is a self-assessment tool to enable a rapid self-assessment for projects, which identifies any environment-related risk factors and prompts mitigation actions, as well as encouraging teams to explore opportunities for environment-nutrition win-wins. The tool and process were piloted throughout 2022 with a diverse set of 10 GAIN projects. GAIN has published a working paper on the Environment Screening Tool and formed a Community of Practice where various organisations could share and learn on this critical topic.
GAIN aims to raise awareness about and inspire action around the intrinsic link between food systems, nutrition, and the environment among policymakers and other decision makers. While GAIN has predominantly focused on global initiatives so far it plans to expand its engagement to the national level through the NFP program. We aim to build partnerships with environment organizations and agreed an MOU with WWF in 2021.
One significant advocacy GAIN leads is the Initiative on Climate Action and Nutrition (I-CAN) launched at the climate COP27 with the Government of Egypt, FAO, WHO and SUN. I-CAN aims to catalyze, mobilize, connect and advocate for integrated climate and nutrition action. As part of this work GAIN will publish a report in October 2023 outlining the extent to which action is currently integrated across policy (such as National Climate Adaptation Plans and National Nutrition Plans), research and data and finance.
To address GAIN’s own environmental impacts, we plan to set a baseline and measure our progress towards reducing the footprint from our own operations. GAIN approved a travel policy in 2021 including a commitment to halve CO2 emissions/ FTE by 50% by 2025 compared with pre-COVID levels of travel and put in place carbon offsetting in place for work-related travel.
In each GAIN office, interested staff lead efforts to ‘green our offices’ to reduce energy and water use, reduce waste and increase awareness of environmental issues. and once a year we celebrate “Green Week at GAIN”.
Lead, Environment and Nutrition
