Level: Introductory

Description: 

The Cost of a Healthy Diet, and the number of people who cannot afford a healthy diet, will be reported annually alongside other traditional food security monitoring indicators by the UN State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World reports. In this session, we share the methods for calculating this indicator and sub-metrics (including estimating the cost of each food group), and offer newly-developed 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.

Learning Lab Slides and Activity materials:

1. Overview - Cost of Healthy Diets (Slides)
2. Subnational Monitoring of Cost of Healthy Diet in Nigeria (Slides)
3. See below the files used for our exercise during the workshop, where we learned how to import food price data into into the Food Prices for Nutrition software, and match foods items to generic food categories -- all key steps to calculating the Cost of a Healthy Diet indicator in your country or context. 

• Calculating the Cost of a Healthy diet (Demo slides)
• Calculating the Cost of a Healthy diet (Activity instructions)
• Calculating the Cost of a Healthy diet Activity (Excel sheet 1)
• Calculating the Cost of a Healthy diet Activity Completed (Excel sheet 2)
• Examples using Price Data

Preparatory materials:

• Food Prices for Nutrition website: https://sites.tufts.edu/foodpricesfornutrition/ 
• Herforth, A., Y. Bai, A. Venkat, K. Mahrt, A. Ebel & W.A. Masters (2020). Cost and affordability of healthy diets across and within countries. Background paper for the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. FAO Agricultural Development Economics Technical Study No. 9. Rome: FAO. 
• Bai, Y., E. Naumova and W.A. Masters (2020). Seasonality in diet costs reveals food system performance in East Africa. Science Advances, eabc2162. 

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