When we think about improving nutrition, our minds often jump to the dinner plate: the colourful vegetables, the lean proteins, the whole grains. We focus on consumer choices, dietary guidelines, and the individual responsibility to eat healthily. But what if the most critical decisions shaping our nutrition have already been made long before the food reaches our plate? What if the very food environments where we buy our food are the true starting point for a healthy diet?
Good Nature Agro (GNA), a Zambia-based enterprise with presence in Malawi and South Africa, produces high-quality groundnut and bean seeds and commodities, distributed across Southern and Central Africa, including Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia. Founded in 2014, GNA has supported over 20,000 smallholder farmers this season with seeds, training and market access to improve incomes and livelihoods.
From its early years, GNA set a target of 40% female farmer representation and invested in key programs to improve female farmers’ experience. Initiatives included co-farmer registration for digital payments, family financial literacy training, pre-harvest payments and loans, asset financing, and gender training for all field staff. These efforts created measurable impacts on productivity and strengthened women’s engagement in high-value markets. Recent surveys confirmed that female farmers continue to experience increased production efficiency and have a positive experience with GNA, reflected in a 60 Decibels net promoter score of 57 (the likelihood of farmers recommending GNA to others, on a scale from -100 to +100).
By the end of 2025, The Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) of Indonesia recorded extreme rainfall, with intensities reaching 300–500 mm per month, occurring in 3 provinces in Sumatra. Indonesia is facing a combination of relatively complex atmospheric dynamics, including the active Asian Monsoon, the Madden–Julian Oscillation (MJO), atmospheric waves, the formation of tropical cyclone seeds and tropical cyclones, as well as the influence of a weak La Niña and a negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). These conditions increased rainfall intensity, particularly from mid-December 2025 to early January 2026.
Micronutrient deficiencies, particularly those of vitamin D and Folate, are global public health concerns that significantly affect populations in developing regions. Vitamin D deficiency affects over one billion people globally, with 37.3% having serum levels below 50 nmol/L, particularly in sun-limited regions and high-risk populations [1–4].
A child’s diet is central to their long-term development, health, and well-being. For children, access to healthy diets can be instrumental for doing well in school, and ultimately shapes a child’s ability to attain a dignified, productive livelihood and decent quality of life in the future.
Food choices play a dual role in shaping both human health and environmental sustainability. At the individual level, diets that lack diversity, fall short of essential nutrients, contain excessive amounts of foods high in sugar, unhealthy fats, and salt, or fail to meet food safety standards, and can have serious negative consequences for health (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, 2025; World Health Organization, n.d.). At the same time, the ways food is produced and consumed affect the environment, —contributing to land degradation, freshwater depletion, climate change, and biodiversity loss (Crippa et al., 2021; Tilman et al., 2017). These environmental impacts, in turn, influence which foods are available, accessible, and affordable, and can alter the nutrient density of crops (Beach et al., 2019; Smith & Myers, 2018), reinforcing this close connection between our food choices and the environment.
From a loan of 150,000 Ugandan Shillings, to Changing How a Community Eats
When school was no longer an option, Victoria Winyana didn't back down. Armed with a modest loan from her mother and a vision to make healthy eating effortless, she transformed a simple market stall into a hub for community well-being.
Read how this young Ugandan vendor turned a struggle for survival into a movement for nutrition, trust, and empowerment, one bundle of greens at a time.
The story highlights Rose Nabasirye, a vegetable vendor in Uganda with over twenty years of experience in the informal food economy, who uses her market stall as an informal classroom to promote healthy eating. Through daily interactions, she guides customers on dietary diversity, taste, and simple recipes, helping transform vegetables into an accessible and creative part of their daily meals. Her involvement with GAIN’s Fit Foods initiative has further enhanced her stall's visibility and credibility, demonstrating how market vendors serve as essential, trusted frontline influencers in improving community nutrition outcomes.
As a vital bridge in Uganda’s local food system, supplier Jamada Nduga travels across rural villages to scout fresh, safe, and chemical-free produce directly from smallholder farmers. By connecting hardworking growers with market vendors through initiatives like GAIN's Fit Foods project, Jamada ensures fair market access for farmers and reliable, high-quality inventory for sellers while playing an essential upstream role in elevating community diets, food safety, and household livelihoods—one fresh vegetable at a time.
We are thrilled to share a major milestone in Bangladesh’s journey to improve maternal nutrition: more than 100 million Multiple Micronutrient Supplement (MMS) tablets, marketed under the brand name “FullCare”, have been sold since the launch of the country’s first locally produced UNIMMAP-formulated MMS.
