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, we demonstrate 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). We will practice cognitive testing and adaptation, two processes that are essential to gathering reliable information.

The Synthesis Centre for Agriculture and Nutrition Research (SCANR) is an online hub that connects researchers with data, resources, and expert critical perspectives for each stage in the process of secondary data analysis. In this session, participants will learn about the origins, opportunities, and challenges posed by the wealth of publicly available secondary data related to agriculture, food systems, and health. They will be introduced to the SCANR tool and will identify and address key challenges that they face in their own secondary data analysis.

COVID-19 has exacerbated inequality in food systems, disproportionally impacting women/girls. Building forward better requires a shift in thinking to understand power imbalances and resulting gender inequalities that impact the way food is produced and consumed. Programs need to focus on changing conditions, so women/girls are empowered to lead as transformational change agents. It also demands change in systems, to become more equitable/responsive to the needs of women/girls. The Gender-Transformative Framework for Nutrition (GTFN) harnesses evidence-based research to support game changing program, policy and research design that makes gender equality the central foundation upon which multi-sectoral responses to nutrition are built. Participants will learn about the fundamental interlinkages between nutrition, food systems and gender equality, look at challenges and opportunities regarding measuring these linkages, and participate in an exercise to analyse gendered causes of malnutrition to move from theoretical understanding to practical application.

Food prices are collected by many organizations, but are not often used to understand the cost of nutritious food to meet dietary needs. In 2020, for the first time the UN State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report highlighted the cost and affordability of healthy diets. In this session, we share the techniques to generate these results, and offer tools for participants to calculate the Cost of a Healthy Diet from their own price datasets. This session mirrors training courses for the World Bank and national governments, currently under development within the Food Prices for Nutrition project.

Data visualization is widely used to communicate agriculture, nutrition, and health data. However, a graph or dashboard do not necessarily inspire action. Choosing effective, accurate, and compelling ways to visualize data based on key messages and target audience is a vital skill for anyone who wants to use data visualization to influence action. The session will share concrete skills on how to visualize data based on communication goals and existing data visualization and human cognition research. The training complements existing DataDENT Tableau Public tutorials that participants can freely explore following the session.

Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA) implements the Feed the Future Rwanda Hinga Weze Activity is a USAID-funded (2017-2022) initiative designed to sustainably increase smallholder farmers income, market access, resilience of local food systems, and improve nutrition among women of reproductive age (WRA) and children under two years old. Hinga Weze has maintained a strong collaboration with the Government of Rwanda at national and district levels, and is helping to advance government goals to improve nutrition among WRA and children under two through implementing various nutrition interventions across 10 Districts. Hinga Weze’s collaboration with the Government of Rwanda demonstrates how nutrition-sensitive agricultural development programs can help advance partner government nutrition priorities. In this Learning Lab, representatives from the Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA) Hinga Weze Activity and the Government of Rwanda will share experiences, lessons learned, and recommendations on how other nutrition-sensitive development programs can successfully work with partner governments to improve nutrition. The first part of the Learning Lab will be a panel discussion, then during the second half of the Learning Lab, participants will join breakout discussions with the panelists to discuss topics in more detail.

Randomized control trials (RCTs) are increasingly used as one of the tools to build the evidence base on the effectiveness of ANH interventions. The complex nature of ANH trials leads to questions and confusion among researchers, funders, and users of ANH evidence about how to conduct ANH trials and interpret their findings. The session will address key topics of confusion including the number of outcomes that can be assessed, the definition and meaning of primary and secondary outcomes, and whether to control for multiplicity.

In this learning lab, participants will walk through a training of how to define their economic evaluation question, identify activities and inputs, costs and benefits and map these through to a standardized approach for measuring economic costs and benefits of multisectoral nutrition strategies. They will be introduced to a set of data collection tools, excel data entry and analysis tools, and then have an opportunity to apply these to a hypothetical complex integrated agriculture, health and nutrition program. They will gain hands on experience through exercises aimed at estimating and reporting results on the benefits and costs of a simplified program.

The IPC Integrated Food Security and Nutrition Analytical Framework expands on conceptual frameworks used to understand food systems. Through use of different indicators, evidence is “converged” to estimate numbers of people affected at different severities of food insecurity and malnutrition. These provide decision-makers with information to support response-planning. The session will expand on the Framework through use of a “systems thinking” approach, and will comprise a panel including former and present IPC Global Managers, who will situate IPC analysis in the context of current global food systems discourse. A practical application using recent country data will be demonstrated.

Livestock play a key role in agriculture, nutrition and health through animal source foods, food safety or as livelihood assets. Animal welfare is a crucial, yet often overlooked, aspect of livestock agriculture and research, as it impacts on animal and human health, and livestock productivity. This session will explore key concepts and issues in animal welfare in relation to ANH research and practice. It will mirror the research process from design to dissemination of results and animal welfare will be highlighted along the way. Participants will work with real life scenarios to understand how animal welfare is linked to human wellbeing and research ethics. We particularly encourage those working in nutrition and human health to attend.

Dietary data are critical to inform policies across the agriculture, nutrition, food safety, and health sectors. This learning lab will improve participants’ understanding of available methods for dietary assessment and their suitability for addressing different diet-related policy questions. Two innovative tools for the collection and use of quantitative, individual-level dietary data will be presented: the FAO/WHO Global Individual Food consumption Tool (FAO/WHO GIFT) and the INDDEX24 Dietary Assessment Platform. Learning lab participants will have an opportunity to use real dietary data to generate their own infographics on food and nutrient-based indicators using the FAO/WHO GIFT platform.

This session complements a recently-launched distance learning course on the project-level Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI). During the session, participants will go deeper on various aspects of pro-WEAI, including survey fieldwork, index construction, qualitative analysis, as well as reporting and interpretation of results, each of which will be developed into an instructor-led module under the pro-WEAI course in the coming years. The session will also provide resources for all participants to learn more about how to use pro-WEAI. To ensure that everyone is familiar with the basics of pro-WEAI, all participants will be required to take the free online course here in advance of the session.

The complementary feeding period (6-23 months) is a critical time for healthy growth and development. This session will present 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. Then participants will learn 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. We will give participants hands-on practice using practical tools in mock scenarios and then have participants discuss challenges and brainstorm solutions.

The learning lab will provide a brief overview of the ROFE project (Phases 1-3) and be followed by a facilitated discussion about:
i) Methodologies for integrated research drawing on public health nutrition, food systems mapping, value chain approaches and policy analysis to develop informed policy recommendations
ii) The value of understanding where food comes from to improve targeting of public health nutrition policy & recommendations
iii) Future research on the nutrition transition in low income communities in Africa

Rapid shifts in global and national food systems have profound implications for the nutritional well-being of populations across the world. The food system is a common paradigm through which to investigate diets, nutrition and health, as well as environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Viewing promotion of sustainable healthy diets through the lens of food choice connects individual perspectives and behaviors to food systems. This learning lab addresses concepts and strategies for action to promote sustainable healthy diets with two panel discussions. Panel 1 will address evolution of food systems concepts and the importance of viewing sustainable healthy diets through the lenses of food environments and food choice. Panel 2 will address how to use these constructs when engaging with stakeholders to position context-specific innovative strategies and actions for uptake and scaling.

Our ANH2021 keynote speaker will be announced soon! This opening plenary and welcome session will also feature Peter Piot, Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

More information coming soon about our parallel thematic sessions featuring innovative ANH research presentations from around the world!

More information coming soon about our social hangouts and side events!

More information coming soon about our social hangouts and side events!

More information coming soon about panel speakers!

More information coming soon about our parallel thematic sessions featuring innovative ANH research presentations from around the world!

More information coming soon about panel speakers!

More information coming soon about our social hangouts and side events!

More information coming soon about our social hangouts and side events!

More information coming soon about panelists!

More information coming soon about our parallel thematic sessions featuring innovative ANH research presentations from around the world!

More information coming soon about how to vote for your favourite poster presentations!

More information coming soon about our social hangouts and side events!