Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
The World Health Organization worked with partners to develop a technical package that outlines eight interdependent elements for action planning. These include service priorities and quality goals, shared local understanding of quality, stakeholder mapping and engagement, situational analysis, governance for quality, interventions for quality improvement, health information systems and quality assessment, and quality measurement. Local expertise and experience are critical to adapt the approach to local settings.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
While language focusing on food consumption as an individual behavior encourages interventions to educate individuals to make better choices, language of eating practices and patterns invokes a socioecological frame that regards consumption practices as enmeshed within broader social contexts. Shifting language away from individual behaviors may more effectively address the root causes of unhealthy eating patterns, encourage sustained dietary change, and reduce dietary and health inequities.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Inadequate quantity and quality of foods during the complementary feeding period impact growth and development and have immediate and long-term consequences. Affordability assessments indicate that liver, small fish, dark green leafy vegetables, milk, and eggs are the most affordable sources to address nutritional shortfalls. Collective action to reduce the prices of these foods and raise incomes is critical; social protection services, improved access to fortified foods, and increasing home production of nutritious foods are also important strategies.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
The Comprehensive Nutrient Gap Assessment tool identifies micronutrient gaps and provides guidance about how to use various types of evidence to assess the significance of nutrient gaps in a given population as well as the best sources of those nutrients. This briefing series summarizes the results of CONGAs of the complementary feeding period in multiple countries in Eastern and Southern Africa and South Asia.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Aquaculture can contribute to building resilient food systems, improving nutrition, and providing employment and export earnings. Aquaculture products should be integrated into agriculture and trade policies, national food-based dietary guidelines, and nutrition and health policies and strategies.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
This brief places health-promotion, disease prevention, and food safety at the center of defining a healthy diet and urges translation of this definition into specific food-based recommendations. The Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization developed guiding principles to ensure culturally appropriate, sustainable, affordable, and healthy diets that align with these principles and form the basis for interventions.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Authors discuss high quality methodologies to collect, analyze, interpret, and present data on women’s dietary diversity for use in research, impact assessment, and large-scale health and nutrition surveys. Discussions about, and appropriate application of, data to inform policy and programming decisions as well as monitoring and evaluation of nutrition outcomes at global, regional, and country levels is encouraged.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
Fortifying foods with essential vitamins and nutrients, supporting mothers to breastfeed, treating acute malnutrition, and providing nutrient supplements to mothers and children are proven, cost-effective solutions, but this work remains underfunded, limiting the ability to scale interventions. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every system working to improve nutrition, but better knowledge of what works, how much it costs, how to scale and measure progress exist.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
As incomes have declined during the pandemic, families cannot afford nutritious foods while producers and sellers struggle to stay afloat. Health systems are overwhelmed, families are reluctant to seek healthcare, and efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19 are decreasing coverage of other life-saving care. USAID Chief Nutritionist Shawn Baker shares data on the impacts of COVID-19 on nutrition as well as insights about how USAID and partners are using data to adapt programming and ensure more effective, coordinated responses to this crisis. This is a podcast.
Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review
More than 45 percent of infant and young child deaths are attributable to undernutrition. However, as this article points out, donor funding for nutrition services is less than 1 percent of donor investment in development as a whole. Despite proven solutions to screen and treat children, underfunding hinders large-scale progress with enormous consequences. A range of stakeholders—from governments, development banks, and civil society to philanthropies and the private sector—play a critical role in increasing funding for nutrition.