- 26/07/2024
Improving food safety in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly in the traditional markets where most consumers shop, is crucial for advancing nutrition, health, and other development goals. Feed the Future’s (FTF) Evidence and Action Towards Safe, Nutritious Food (FTF EatSafe) activity aimed to stimulate and leverage consumer demand for safer food to drive improvements in food safety in traditional markets.
- 26/07/2024
Feed the Future’s EatSafe: Evidence and Action Towards Safe, Nutritious Food (FTF EatSafe) aimed to boost consumer demand for safe, nutritious foods in traditional markets in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), specifically Nigeria and Ethiopia. Utilizing a two-phased approach, FTF EatSafe's Phase I combined global evidence with local situational analyses to understand the context, and Phase II involved designing, testing, and implementing interventions to empower consumers.
Insights from formative research guided the development of interventions, including the Vendor Training Initiative in Hawassa, Ethiopia. The Vendor Training Initiative, piloted in the Aroge Gebeya market in Hawassa
- 18/09/2024
Political economy dynamics—that is, conflicts and trade-offs across different interest groups that play an important role in the food system—permeate many decisions about food systems policy and implementation. Development practitioners working in the food systems space—inclusive of agriculture, nutrition, and environmental policies—need to be aware of these dynamics to be able to support policy advocacy, development, and implementation.
- 10/09/2024
Environmental factors impact human health and nutrition through various pathways, and these impacts can be felt disproportionately by already vulnerable groups like women and children.
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.
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.
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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
