The Agriculture, Nutrition & Health (ANH) Academy

  • 02nd July 2018
  • by secretary
Paepard

25 – 29 June 2018. Accra, Ghana. The Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (ANH) Academy.

The ANH Academy Week programme featured Learning Labs (training workshops) offered by ANH Academy partners, a scientific Research Conference with invited papers, poster and panel sessions, and many opportunities for networking with other researchers and research-users. Presentations for the scientific Research Conference were selected through a call for abstracts under the following themes:

  1. Agriculture-food system policies and programmes and nutrition outcomes
  2. Trade, markets and nutrition and health outcomes
  3. Agriculture-food systems, environment, and nutrition and health outcomes
  4. Agriculture-food systems, food safety and human health
  5. Agricultural and infectious disease burden
  6. Innovative methods and metrics in agriculture-food systems and nutrition/health research
  7. Economic evaluation of agriculture-nutrition programmes and policies
  8. Governance and institutions for leveraging agriculture-food system

Businesses are a part of the problem and a part of the solution for reducing malnutrition and improving diets within food systems. The private sector is the main investor in the food system in every stage from farm to fork. If the incentives are not right, sustainable agricultural development and nutrition will not be a key driver of their activities in addition to profit maximization. GAIN and WUR have been working at the interface of business, food, diets and nutrition for the past decade.

Affordability of Nutritious Diets
Policies and programs are increasingly focused on making nutritious diet more affordable, at the times and places where people are most at risk of malnutrition. Previous work focuses on prices of individual foods, but new techniques use prices of many different foods to compute the overall cost of meeting dietary standards at each time and place. This session used real data from Ghana, Tanzania and elsewhere to measure trends over time, seasonal fluctuations and spatial differences.

  • Zachary Gersten, MPH Project Administrator*, The Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University
  • William Masters Professor, Tufts University
  • Anna Herforth Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Columbia University in the City of New York
  • Daniel Sarpong DEAN, School Of Agriculture

Resources

Unlocking Potential: Livestock Derived Foods and the First 1,000 days
Chatham House and the International Livestock Research Institute are launching a newly published report that explores the contribution of livestock-derived foods (LDF) to nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life in LMIC. Summarizing the findings from an extensive review of literature, the report presents the potential of LDF to contribute to nutrition in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), discusses the health and environmental externalities derived from increased global LDF consumption and presents recommendations to enhance the benefits from their increased consumption in those settings.

African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) Panel Session

Under the auspices of the ANH Conference, the African Economic Research Consortium (www.aercafrica.org) featured a breakfast briefing session on four research projects on Analysis of the Impacts of Agricultural and Food Policies for Nutrition Outcomes in Africa (AFPON) that are being implemented by AERC with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The AFPON project that was launched in October 2017 seeks to contribute to the recent interest in leveraging agricultural development for improving nutrition by exploring the link between agricultural policies and nutrition outcomes in Africa. It seeks to understand, among other things, how policies affecting differential access to productive resources, such as land, education, and finance affect the nutrition of individuals and households in African countries. Related to that is understanding how agricultural productivity, agricultural extension, and advisory services affect nutrition outcomes, and establishing the policies and practices that would best improve nutritional status.

Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Meeting
The purpose of the session was to update delegates on upcoming funding opportunities, to provide an opportunity to meet with other GCRF grant holders to seek synergy between projects and form contacts for future collaborations.

Video coverage: 


Source: PAEPARD FEED

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