This brief describes a Government of India initiative – the Healthy and Hygienic Food Streets (HHFS) programme that aims to make the country’s street food safer. It shares some of GAIN’s recent contributions to these efforts and provides some implications for national and state governments to consider.
Global tea production totals over USD 17 billion annually, and the sector continues to grow. In many countries, the tea sector contributes significantly to income and employment for millions of rural families, with smallholder farmers producing 60 percent of world production. However, tea workers and farmers often suffer from high malnutrition rates because their diets, which consist largely of staple foods such as rice, bread, maize, and wheat, often lack foods rich in essential nutrients and vitamins needed for good health. Nutritious foods are often less affordable and available to this population, and they may be less aware of the importance of healthy diets. In Assam State, one of the main tea-producing states in India, 18 percent of women are underweight, 66 percent of women are anaemic, and 15 percent of women are overweight.
In 2019, in an effort to improve the efficiency and sustainability of its programming, GAIN’s Workforce Nutrition Programme (WFN) shifted away from the traditional project development and evaluation cycle towards a nimbler "Quality Improvement" (QI) approach.
Limited access to markets and poor market infrastructure are underlying factors that negatively impact nutrition outcomes for the rural poor in hard-to-reach areas, including communities working on tea estates in India. An innovative and sustainable market-based supply chain model was tested in Assam, India, to improve the nutrition of the tea estate communities.
Healthy diets are unaffordable to over 2 billion people worldwide and food access remains a challenge for many. The food environment illustrates the interaction of consumers with different food retail outlets to acquire and consume food.
As elaborated in a GAIN evidence brief, poor-quality diets and insufficient food quantity are linked to reduced work capacity. This suggests that the malnutrition burden can be partly addressed through a win-win-win approach which improves individual lives, business outcomes, and national economies.
Diet quality in India is characterized by overall inadequate dietary diversity, despite high rates of consumption of vegetables, animal-source foods (mostly dairy), and whole grains. Action is needed to reduce reliance on starchy staples, to increase consumption of fruits, nuts and seeds in particular, and to moderate intakes of sweet foods and drinks, and packaged salty snacks.
GAIN’s Workforce Nutrition program conceived and implemented a market-based supply chain solution to enhance the food environment around tea estates by leveraging the existing neighbourhood line shops to improve access to healthy foods.
GAIN, Unilever, and the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH) saw an opportunity to improve the nutrition and health of farmers, workers, and their families in supply chains, whilst working to increase supplier and worker satisfaction, productivity and brand loyalty.