The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) last year estimated that healthy diets are affordable to only 15% of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa. With the 2030 goals of eradicating global hunger and malnutrition approaching, policy-makers are increasingly exploring options to adapt regional food systems to improve the flow of affordable nutrition to underserved urban populations. Problematically, for equitable and sustainable decision-making, communities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) tend to possess little to no information on where their food is produced, how their food is transported and distributed, what the vulnerabilities in their nutrient supplies are and how to embed resilience in them.

This project aims to develop and demonstrate a spatially-explicit foodshed-level planning approach that will enable researchers, practitioners and decision-makers to diagnose and plan interventions to help communities ensure stable and resilient supplies of key nutrients. The proposed NutriShed approach innovates beyond existing value chains, food environments, and foodshed methodologies by taking a holistic food systems view of nutrition security. Such an approach helps to shift the focus from single commodity value chains and retail environments, to the range of locally-relevant foods contributing to supplies of key nutrients, and cross-cutting dimensions of markets delivering nutrient-dense foods (e.g., market facilities, roads, and storage). 

A NutriShed framework will be developed around two contrasting regional food systems in Ghana:

(i) Takoradi, a city of nearly one-million people, and

(ii) Asesewa, a small town of approximately 20,000 inhabitants.