Tools and Data

There are a wealth of software tools and data sources available for researchers interested in access to healthy diets.

A selection of these tools and data are below. For more guidance about conducting research in general, visit the Support Centre for Agriculture and Nutrition Research here. SCANR has a list of data repositories for conducting research here and several how to guides for popular software tools here.

Do you have a resource you'd like to share with the community? Email [email protected] to submit your addition.

Software Tools

• Software tools for calculating the Cost of a Healthy Diet
  • The software tools on this page are designed to help you convert any set of food price data into the cost per day of a healthy diet, using Excel or Stata. These calculations are now used for the Cost and Affordability of Healthy Diets (CoAHD) metric of global food security reported in FAOSTAT
  • ‘Food Prices for Nutrition: Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet and other Indicators‘ is a self-paced, open access course that trains users on the construction of diet cost and affordability indicators focusing on access to a healthy diet and other dietary standards.
• SCANR has how to guides for software including Excel, R, MPlus, Python, Stata, SPSS, SAS, spatial analysis, and data storage

Data Repositories

This is a sample of the data sources available in SCANR that may be highly relevant to this Research Community. 

• FAOSTAT: A repository of food and agriculture data for over 245 countries and territories created by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
  • Food Balance Sheets: FAO's Food Balance Sheets provide a comprehensive view of each country's food supply by year. Check out SCANR's How-To Guide to Food Balance Sheets for more information. 
• Global Individual Food consumption data Tool (FAO/WHO GIFT): A database of national and subnational food consumption surveys harmonized across time, seasons, and geographical locations.
• International Household Survey Network (IHSN) Survey Catalog: A searchable list of surveys and censuses conducted in low- and middle-income countries.
• World Bank DataBank: A data analysis and visualization tool that allows users to generate tables, charts, and maps and download time series data on a variety of topics related to global development.
• World Bank Data Catalog: A catalog of data collected by the World Bank.
• World Bank Open Data: A database of indicators related to global development searchable by country and indicator.