From Farm to Flush

The Lancet, one of the world famous medical journals, published its special series on obesity for 2015. Since the issue of obesity is relatively new, there are a lot of brand-new approaches we can take. Some content of the series focus on policy aspects as well as on linkage between scholarship and policies. Moving beyond food guidelines which suggest the desirable diet, some researchers go deeper and argue how to change the built food environment.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) published the Global Nutrition Report 2014, which provides a global profile on nutrition as well as country profiles.

One of the greatest and most useful things about this report is the Nutrition Country Profiles, which give us a whole picture of nutrition status of a specific country with over 80 indicators and trends. To make improvements in your working filed, the country profiles provide data about nutrition outcome, situation analysis, and opportunities for action.

In the past few months, Sierra Leone received a lot of international attention as it is one of the countries together with Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria, severely affected by Ebola.  Besides the more than 3000 deaths, the Ebola outbreak also impacted the livelihoods and food security situation of the people in these countries badly.

Most of these countries were already trying to deal with poverty, food insecurity and high malnutrition rate amongst children before the outbreak and now the situation has been further aggravated.

In their September Briefing Paper, SLRC share the findings of a recent research (before the Ebola outbreak) which shows that behaviour change programs should not only target women only as their actions and behaviours are influenced by other household members. Therefore, behavior programs should also include interventions with other household members.

Key messages of this briefing paper:

Promoting good child nutrition must go beyond dissemination of infant and young child feeding practices to engage with key influences on mothers’ behaviour.

‘Exclusive’ breastfeeding is rarely exclusive, with traditional remedies frequently given to infants.

Decision-making around food distribution, household finances and when to stop breastfeeding is deeply gendered, influencing the ability of women to act on knowledge about appropriate feeding practices.

These social conditions that sustain malnutrition are exacerbated during ‘lean seasons’, when there are greater labour demands, compromised sanitation, and limited coping mechanisms.

USAID Agrilinks is organizing a special event titled “Changing Agricultural Aid Through Understanding Farmer Seed Systems”.  The event will take place on October 9 from 930-11am EDT (1:30-3:00pm GMT)

Here is a brief description of the event:

A better understanding of farmer seed systems can ease transitions from emergency to longer-term agricultural development programs. Understanding how farmers source seeds is key to commercializing and promoting adoption of new varieties. USAID teams can use such context-specific information to more fully support local seed systems and better design assistance programs. For example, various assessment tools can be used to evaluate seed marketing challenges and opportunities both during and after emergency assistance periods.

This special event will track the changing course of seed-related input assistance. By sharing concrete examples from difficult contexts throughout sub-Saharan Africa, presenters will highlight tools to help practitioners with seed-related decision making and field analysis of seed systems, and explore issues related to both chronic and acute seed insecurity. The event also will share lessons from a variety of seed interventions, including how to determine the best seed distribution approaches such as market-based fairs and vouchers, subsidized seeds, or direct distribution.

Development and humanitarian practitioners interested in food and seed security will benefit from the information shared at this event.

What is conservation agriculture? How does it work? The UN's Food and Agricultural Organization describes conversation agriculture as: a concept for resource-saving agricultural crop production that strives to achieve acceptable profits together with high and sustained production levels while concurrently conserving the environment (FAO 2007). Join Foods Resource Bank and Mennonite Central Committee to discuss conservation agriculture (CA) in Africa.

The webinar will be conducted on October 21 12:00 PM EDT

Register for the Webinar on Conservation Agriculture now!

Mercy Corps has released a report based on their study in Sahel Region.  The study was conducted in Mali, Niger and Northern Nigeria.  It examined the differing vulnerabilities and capacities of men, women, boys, and girls in order to get better understanding on what factors help building the resilience of individuals, households, and communities.  As a result, Mercy Corps concludes that it is impossible to build resilience in households and communities without also addressing systemic gender inequality.  

Here are important points from the study:

Gender influences sensitivity to disturbances and, even within the same household, individuals will experiences shocks and stresses in different ways.

Men, women, boys, and girls differ in their perceptions of the impact of shocks

Gender also influences the skills, strategies, and mechanisms individuals use to cope with and adapt to disturbances

This article provides results of the child undernutrition trend analysis from 1993 to 2008-09 in Kenya.  The analyses uses the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey data collected from women aged 15-49 years and children aged 0-35 months in 1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008-9.

The study concludes that the national trends in childhood undernutrition in Kenya showed significant declines in underweight, while trends in wasting and stunting were stagnant.  Analyses disaggregated by demographic and socio-economic segments revealed some significant departures from these overall trends, some improving and some worsening.  

Fish is one of the most important affordable source of protein for many people in the least developed countries and or for many people in the developing countries of Africa and Asia.  It provides essential fatty acids and micronutrients that crucial for child’s growth and development.  

This report provides an analysis results of existing evidence regarding the complex pathways between fisheries and aquaculture and food and nutrition security, including the environmental, economic and social dimensions, as well as issues related to governance.  The report also provides insights on what needs to be done to achieve sustainable fisheries and aquaculture in order to strengthen their positive impact on food and nutrition security.  

Just recently, UNFAO released its annual report on progress of hunger reduction efforts.  This year report provides an update on number of undernourishment and also progress towards meeting the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) and World Food Summit (WFS) targets.  

Key Messages of SOFI this year report are:

The latest FAO estimates indicate that global hunger reduction continues: about 805 million people are estimated to be chronically undernourished in 2012–14, down more than 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990–92. In the same period, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 to 11.3 percent globally and from 23.4 to 13.5 percent for developing countries.

Since 1990-92, 63 countries have reached the hunger target of MDG-1 and 25 countries have achieved the more stringent WFS target. Of the 63 developing countries, 11 already had undernourishment levels below 5 percent (the methodological limit that can assure significance of the results different from zero) in 1990-1992 and have been able to keep it in that interval, and are therefore not the prime focus of the 2014 report.

The figures demonstrate that the hunger target of the Millennium Development Goal – of halving the proportion of undernourished people in developing countries by 2015 – is within reach.

Despite overall progress, marked differences across regions persist. Latin America and the Caribbean have made the greatest overall progressin increasing food security with modest progress in sub-Saharan Africa and Western Asia, which have been afflicted by natural disasters and conflict.

Sustained political commitment at the highest level, with food security and nutrition as top priorities, is a prerequisite for hunger eradication. The case studies of the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014 report show that regions such as Africa and the Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as individual countries have strengthened their political commitment to food security and nutrition.

Hunger reduction requires an integrated approach, and needs to include: public and private investments to raise agricultural productivity; better access to inputs, land, services, technologies and markets; measures to promote rural development; social protection for the most vulnerable, including strengthening their resilience to conflicts and natural disasters; and specific nutrition programmes, particularly to address micronutrient deficiencies in mothers and children under five.

This article provides a very informative review on causes and consequences of chronic malnutrition and their relationship with multiple sectors. It is a highly recommended article to read for understanding the causes of chronic malnutrition using UNICEF Conceptual Framework of undernutrition and how to address them. It discusses about different approaches from different sectors that addressing immediate, underlying and basic causes of the undernutrition.  

There is no single intervention that could be considered as silver bullet to tackle chronic malnutrition.  There is no single sector that has been successful in making single-handed an impact, but if there was an impact it was always the result of collaboration and coordination with other sectors. Maybe not surprising when you consider the complexity of the problems and short window for optimal child’s growth (first 1000 days).   

Therefore, multi-sectoral approaches are very crucial to ensure that there is an improvement of nutrition - at least these three sectors need to engage and collaborate with each other: health, agriculture and environment sector.

The opening plenary of the 2014 World Water Week took place on Monday, September 1st.  It was webcasted lives.  The opening plenary video can be found here

The highlighted sessions on this second day of 2014 World Water Week are:

Water and Energy: Getting the Priorities Right for Smallholder Farmers.  Convenors: CARE International and International Union for Conservation of Nature.  Co-convenors: Catholic Relief Services and International Institute for Environment and Development.  The presentations can be found here

Looking at the 2014 World Water Week Programmes, we see that there are a lot of interesting sessions.  Although, we are not physically present in this important event, we still can access to a lot of presentation, resources or other important materials posted in their website.

This event has been started since Sunday, August 31st.  From list of sessions conducted on Sunday, we would like to highlight several relevant sessions to CWS’s works:

Water and Energy: Expounding on the 2014 World Water Development Report. Convenor: World Water Assessment Programme.  The Presentation can be found here

Securing Water, Energy, Sanitation and Livelihoods through Consensus: Community led approaches in Africa. Convenor: Africa AHEAD and Co-convenor: Stockholm Environment Institute.  The presentation can be found here

Since 1991, World Water Week Conference is held in the month of August or September each year.  This year, it will be held from August 31 - September 5 in Stockholm and the theme is Energy and Water.  Energy and water are two important things for meeting human basic needs, eliminating hunger, malnutrition and poverty.  

The conference will take a comprehensive look how energy and water are developed and managed for the good of society and ecosystems – at local, national, regional and global levels – including how to  avoid unintended consequences as a result of  narrow sectoral approaches.

Detailed information about this conference can be found here

This report provides detailed results analysis from a study focused on modeling relationship between contextual factors, sectoral interventions and nutrition-relevant outcomes among children under five years.  The study was conducted by Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development (CGSD - The Earth Institute, Columbia University).  

The study examines some specific interventions on five intermediate outcomes areas linked to child stunting: complementary feeding, diarrhea incidence, family planning, maternal nutrition and breastfeeding behaviors.  

The study focuses on specific interventions from these sectors:

Public health sector

Environment and Water sector

Agriculture sector

Formal education sector

Food safety of complementary foods

Mass media campaigns on the uptake of exclusive breastfeeding

Climate change and nutrition outcomes

Social protection: conditional cash transfers (CCT)

The diagram (see below) is summarizing the result of the study; how each specific intervention impacts the intermediate outcomes.  It also shows that  context-specific factors play an important role in each intervention.  The study provides evidence based recommendations that can help key sectors to make decision on what interventions should be implemented considering such contextual factors that could have a direct impact on the child nutrition outcomes.  

Summary schematic of model and major findings.  Key sector investments were modeled against five intermediary outcomes: exclusive breastfeeding; complementary feeding; maternal diets; water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH); and family planning.  Investment that significantly contribute to these are listed under each sector.  Thickness of arrow indicates significance and level of evidence.  Dotted arrows indicate qualitative narrative, not quantitative.  Major contextual factors that influence these relationships are listed in grey.

Action Contre la Faim (ACF) has released a briefing paper titled: “Who Cares about The Impact of Climate Change on Hunger and Malnutrition?”

As highlighted in the document, that there are still 842 million people suffering from hunger and more than 180 million children affected by undernutrition.  Climate change impacts are predicted to make the situation getting even worse.  It impacts undernutrition through multiple pathways, including food security, water and sanitation, and care practices.

Effects of climate change have already irreversibly affected many populations, in particular the poorest people and the vulnerable groups (women and children) in the developing countries.  As mentioned in the document, with a +2 degree Celcius global average temperature increase, the most optimistic projected warming scenario is that the rate of undernourishment in the Sub-Saharan African population will increase by 25-90% by 2050 relative to today.  

ACF recommends:

To governments, donors, and policy makers, to increase financial support for nutrition-specific and - sensitive interventions that successfully address the expected rise of undernutrition as a consequence of climate change.

To UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change)  parties, to increase funding devoted to adaptation by providing additional public funds for climate change adaptation in the most at-risk countries, prioritizing actions for the most vulnerable groups, households and individuals,

To bilateral, multilateral donors, and countries, to prioritize adaptation programs that include well-defined food and nutrition security objectives.  Developing multi-sectoral programming to manage risks and enhance resilience through a nutrition lens will be necessary, while predominately focusing on the most vulnerable to undernutrition, mother and children.

To the humanitarian community and donors, to make sure that funding will be secured to prepare and respond to the humanitarian consequences of major climate related disasters.

In July 2012 Lutheran World Relief (LWR) launched its Learning for Gender Integration (LGI) initiative through which LWR is acquiring the knowledge and tools to design and implement projects that serve the specific needs of men and women farmers. This approach aims to remove the gender-based obstacles that prevent men and women from fully participating in and benefiting from their farming activities. The focal point for this learning process are three model projects in India, Nicaragua and Uganda, all of which are funded by Foods Resource Bank.  In this webinar, Patrick Bell - a program associate in LWR's Africa team - will explain what gender-integrated programming means, why LWR decided to do it, and share some lessons so far from the model project in Uganda.

Register now!

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3333257819992900610   

This report presents findings from the UNSCN’s review on Country Level Programming for Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture.   The report also provides summaries about the current concept and evidence base for nutrition-sensitive agriculture, also an overview of cross-cutting gender consideration in programming, resilience building, and nutrition education.

The report has 6 parts:

The first part of the report gives the background on terminology and research to date.  

The 2nd part of the report provides an overview of three cross-cutting themes, namely resilience building, women’s empowerment, and improving nutrition knowledge and practices. 

The 3rd part of the report provides basic information on common programming approaches to nutrition-sensitive agriculture.

The 4th part of the report gives specific examples of agencies’ programming experience in nutrition-sensitive agriculture.

The 5th part of the report describes challenges of nutrition-sensitive programming.

The 6th part of the report provides conclusions which highlight the importance of monitoring and evaluating dietary diversity in agricultural projects, and the importance of using ‘gender lens’ in agricultural programming.

There are several points that we would like to highlight from this report:

The official definition of nutrition sensitivity is interventions or programmes that address the underlying determinants  - food security; adequate care giving resources at the maternal, household and community levels; and access to health services and a safe and hygienic environment - and incorporate specific nutrition goals and actions. Nutrition-sensitive programmes can serve as delivery platforms for nutrition-specific interventions, potentially increasing their scale, coverage, and effectiveness.  

There are several impact pathways on how agriculture could improve nutritional outcomes:

Agriculture as a source of food

Agriculture as a source of income

Agriculture as a driver of food prices

Agriculture to improve women’s decision making power and control over resources

Agriculture’s impact on women’s time allocation

Agriculture’s impact on women’s own nutrition and health

The importance of women empowerment.  It has been known for years that women have a very important role in providing and securing food, not only to their own families but also to their community.  It is considered crucial due to these reasons: women make up a large percentage of the agriculture labor force in developing countries and the resources and income flows that women control have been shown to have disproportionately positive impacts on nutrition security.