Reaching Lower-Income Consumers with Nutritious Foods: Distribution Hubs, Direct Sales, and Supporting Distributors and Retailers

Serving the needs of lower-income consumers requires getting food products to where they are—which often includes remote rural areas as well as underserved urban neighbourhoods. This makes distribution a key, but also costly, aspect of the business model. Using a ‘hub’ model, in which aspects of distribution are grouped together instead of done separately, can improve efficiency and cost-sharing, reducing costs overall.

Billions worldwide consume inadequate levels of micronutrients critical to human health

More than half of the global population consumes inadequate levels of several micronutrients essential to health, including calcium, iron, and vitamins C and E, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN). It is the first study to provide global estimates of inadequate consumption of 15 micronutrients critical to human health. 

Leveraging GAIN’s Human-Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit to Boost the Nutrition Impacts of Social Protection

Improving the nutrition impacts of social protection requires targeted improvements to programme designs. GAIN believes that good social protection design involves meaningfully leveraging vulnerable beneficiaries’ voices. Doing so can help administrators better understand how to overcome constraints and address beneficiaries’ specific nutritional needs. Beneficiaries have the advantage of proximity to the key issues: they understand their specific constraints and challenges better than any other system actors. While the need to incorporate beneficiaries’ perspectives, and the value of doing so, is well accepted by social protection administrators, they often face substantial hurdles to doing so in practice: logistical constraints, language barriers, differing value systems, power dynamics, and other factors make meaningful engagement with beneficiaries a significant challenge. GAIN has set out to identify ways to support administrators to overcome these constraints, particularly through human-centered design (HCD).

The Case for Investment in Nutritious Foods Value Chains: An Opportunity for Gender Impact (Case Studies)

- 27/08/2024

As a follow-on to the core report ‘The Case for Investment in Nutritious Food Value Chains: An Opportunity for Gender Impact’, GAIN and SAGANA are publishing the nine case studies showcasing the business and impact case for gender-smart nutrition investments.

GAIN Working Paper n°42 - Investing in Nutrition: Understanding Barriers and Potential Solutions for Development Finance Institutions

- 16/08/2024

While improved nutrition is central to achieving many development goals, investment in nutrition currently falls far short of what is needed. One group of actors that could potentially help address this is development finance institutions (DFIs): specialised financial organisations that promote sustainable development by providing capital, usually for private-sector-led projects. DFIs seem like promising actors to support nutrition: they are already active in low- and middle-income countries, invest in adjacent sectors like agriculture, and have large financial resources. However, to date DFIs have not been very active in investing in nutrition-supporting businesses and funds. This paper seeks to understand the barriers to investment in nutrition-related projects and develop concrete solutions to unlock funding through a mapping of DFIs’ approaches combined with in-depth interviews with several DFI representatives.

ACT4FOOD: A Youth Led Movement to Transform Food Systems

- 13/08/2024

ACT4FOOD was launched as a global youth-led movement to transform food systems, with a pledge to encourage millions of young people to create sustainable food systems and more opportunistically to get involved in the UNFSS and to bring their demands to the decision-making table.

Healthy Diets for Tea Communities - Global Programme Results

- 09/08/2024

In 2021, more than 3.1 billion people in the world – or 42 per cent of the global population – were unable to afford a healthy diet. Tea workers and farmers, predominantly women, often contend with high rates of malnutrition due to diets lacking essential nutrients. Healthy Diets for Tea Communities is a public-private collaboration between the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, the Ethical Tea Partnership and eight leading tea companies which aims to promote healthy diets in tea supply chains in India, Malawi, and Kenya. Between 2020 and 2023, the programme reached 734,075 people, increasing the percentage of women in the programme eating minimally diverse, nutritious diets – 5 out of 10 food groups – in all three countries. The documents below summarise the programme’s impact in Assam, Kenya and Malawi.