GAIN seeks to understand and tackle barriers faced by small enterprises working to boost availability, affordability, desirability, and convenience of nutritious foods like milk, especially for people on low-incomes and population sub-groups who stand to benefit from greater consumption of nutrient-dense foods, such as children.
As conveners of the Global Consultation on Food Systems for Children and Adolescents and this Special Issue, UNICEF and GAIN are confident that the evidence presented in this Special Issue will be useful for food system reorientations in support of improved diet quality among children and adolescents.
Although eggs are highly nutritious, they remain scarce and relatively expensive in many low-income settings, including across many of the countries where GAIN operates. Moreover, they are only rarely consumed by children in many regions. Globally, the average egg supply is around 3.5 eggs per person per week.
Eggs are a widely available and affordable source of protein, vitamins, and minerals that support growth and development, yet they are not frequently fed to children in Kaduna. The ‘Eggs Make Kids’ campaign was launched by GAIN on World Egg Day in October 2019. Using commercial marketing techniques and insights into consumer behaviour, it aims to create demand for eggs as a nutritious food for children aged six months to five years.
Experts estimate that in low- and middle-income countries, optimal breastfeeding has the potential to prevent more than 800,000 deaths in children under age 5 and 20,000 deaths in women every year. Despite this, breastfeeding remains underexploited globally. While the progress seen is positive, there is still a long way to go to achieve global nutrition targets.
These briefs are part of a series on complementary feeding gaps by GAIN and UNICEF under the Regional Initiatives for Sustained Nutrition and Growth (RISING) project. Identification of nutrient and dietary gaps during the complementary feeding period is essential to inform policies and programmes designed to improve child health and nutrition.
Inadequate physical and economic access is one of the primary barriers to consumption of nutritious complementary foods. However, the extent to which affordability is a barrier for specific nutrients, which foods are the most affordable sources of these nutrients and which households are able to afford them in adequate quantities for young children is unclear.
GAIN works on supply and demand, as well as on changing incentives, rules and regulations to encourage production and consumption of nutritious and safe foods. We seek to understand and tackle barriers faced by small enterprises working to boost availability, affordability, desirability, and convenience of nutritious foods like eggs, especially for people on low-incomes.
This factsheet describes the nutritional benefits of eggs for key target populations. Eggs are among the best food sources to improve diet quality in infants, as they contain nutrients which help brain development and physical growth.
The framework comprises a set of drivers, plus four determinants (food supply chains, external food environments, personal food environments, and behaviours of caregivers, children and adolescents), which together influence the diets of children and adolescents.
