Inclusive Food Systems

Enhancing Food Security

We help governments and development partners to increase the nutritional impact of their investments in agricultural initiatives that enhance food security. There is an imminent need to capture evidence for the contribution of agriculture and food systems to ensure the availability of, and access to adequate, affordable, diverse, and nutritious food. Driving projects to become nutrition-sensitive involves not only increasing productivity, production and/or incomes, but also requires changes in consumption habits and practices. This is mediated by gender, requires policy engagement and dialogue and also hinges on coordination with interventions from other sectors. To this end, we help develop and strengthen technical, analytical and managerial capabilities of implementing partners to support the design and implementation of nutrition-sensitive agriculture development projects.

Integrating gender

Very few agencies are able to operationalise a gender-nutrition lens in agricultural development programs. This is especially important for implementing organisations who are looking for methods and tools to analyse realities in the field and identify suitable intervention options. We also capitalize on our expertise in sustainable economic development to facilitate institutional change processes by creating mechanisms and building capacities at different levels that are needed to create an enabling environment that sustains the impact of the interventions.

The uniqueness of our approach is grounded in our application of a gender-nutrition lens to make agriculture development programmes nutrition-sensitive. While looking at the role of the women empowerment pathway to improved nutrition, specific attention is given to the differences between women and men in terms of social norms, values, access and control over resources, roles and decision making in relation to production and consumption of food. In the context of value chains, the nutrition lens positions women as the exclusive drivers of food and nutrition security, and examines critical points for food and nutrient losses, improving food safety and enhancing nutrition value in different stages of food value chains. To promote nutritious food we support business models and demand creation strategies where the enterprises not only make affordable nutritious food products available to low-income consumers but create employment opportunities and incentives for youth and women.