From June 21 - July 1, 2021, the Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (ANH) Academy hosted its its annual gathering of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working at the intersection of agriculture, food systems, nutrition, and health. For the second year in a row, the ANH Academy Week took place online. To foster knowledge exchange, innovation, and learning around interdisciplinary ANH research, the event is split into two components. The first, was a series of Learning Labs. The second half of the event consisted of a Research Conference. Both components of the virtual ANH Academy Week were free of charge, and more information about the event can be found on the ANH Academy website.
Check out the Learning Labs USAID Advancing Nutrition was a part of, including sessions to discuss dietary data collection and essential tools for nutrition social and behavior change.
Learning Labs
Collecting dietary data using country-adapted 5 min survey module (DQ-Q)
Monday, June 21, 2021 from 8:00AM - 9:00PM EDT (GMT - 4)
Agriculture programs often seek to improve diet, but feasible standardized tools have not been available to measure diet quality. Especially for programs that have limited finances and technical capacity, dietary assessment must be low-burden: simple, rapid, reliable, and not requiring nutrition expertise. In this session, panelists demonstrated how a new diet quality questionnaire (DQ-Q) has been designed to capture information on nutrient adequacy, healthy and unhealthy food consumption, with a minimal amount of time (5 minutes) and nutrition expertise (none required). During the webinar, facilitators led a cognitive testing and adaptation exercise, two processes that are essential to gathering reliable information.
Driving Behavior Change for Better Complementary Feeding
Thursday, June 24, 2021 from 8:00AM - 9:00PM EDT (GMT - 4)
The complementary feeding period (6-23 months) is a critical time for healthy growth and development. This session presented an action framework to guide a systematic analysis and systems approach to improving young children’s diets during the complementary feeding period developed by UNICEF. Participants learned about a step-by-step process to improve the design, implementation and measurement of quality social and behavior change for complementary feeding with a deep dive on Rwanda’s experiences to ground the discussion. The session gave participants hands-on practice using practical tools in mock scenarios and then had participants discuss challenges and brainstorm solutions.