Compact2025 News in Brief: April 15, 2020

To accelerate progress to end hunger and undernutrition around the world, the News in Brief informs partners on emerging research and innovation, developments in global, regional, and national policies and programs, and timely news and events. Please feel free to share any feedback at IFPRI-Compact2025@cgiar.org. Find the latest developments in Compact2025 here.

First-ever comparative nutrition investment database launched

Building on five years of work with member countries, the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement has launched the first-ever comparative nutrition investment database. The tool allows users to view budget allocations from any country that has used the SUN budget analysis method and to filter data by sector as well as nutrition-specific or nutrition-sensitive programs.

IFPRI’s 2020 Global Food Policy Report: Building inclusive food systems

Food systems are evolving quickly to meet growing and changing demand, but they are not serving everyone’s needs. IFPRI’s 2020 Global Food Policy Report looks at the obstacles and opportunities as well as the growing range of tools and technologies for building inclusive food systems. Explore the report, synopsis, interactive, blog post, and video of the launch event.

UNICEF, WHO, and World Bank release new child malnutrition estimates

UNICEF, WHO, and the World Bank find in their joint report that malnutrition rates remain alarming: stunting is declining too slowly—affecting 144 million children under 5 in 2019—while wasting still impacts the lives of 47 million young children.

Mobile phones can improve nutrition among pastoral communities

A study in Agricultural Economics analyzes the use of mobile phones in pastoral communities in Northern Kenya and concludes that mobile phone adoption and use are positively and significantly associated with dietary diversity, mainly by providing better access to purchased foods.

Stakeholder-designed global food security scenarios

To guide policymaking, decision makers require a good understanding of the long-term drivers of food security and their interactions, and scenario analysis is widely recognized as the appropriate tool to assess such problems characterized by high complexity and uncertainty. A paper in Global Food Security describes a participatory exercise to construct a set of global food security scenarios up to 2050. The resulting scenarios—developed with a diverse group of stakeholders—can be used as an input into global assessment models for further quantification and analysis.

COVID-19 pandemic resources on food security, nutrition, and more

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, the development community is working to understand how the crisis will impact food security, nutrition, and food systems:

IFPRI hosted a virtual event on April 14 to explore the implications of COVID-19 for global and country-level food security, nutrition, and poverty.
IFPRI’s spotlight page features the latest resources and analyses on COVID-19 including new blog posts on diets in a time of coronavirus, impacts on vegetable value chains, and whether the pandemic will cause another food crisis.
The UN Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN) has compiled a list of resources and key readings related to the COVID-19 crisis with a focus on nutrition and food systems.
The SUN Movement has a knowledge hub to shed light on the links between COVID-19 and nutrition, hunger, health, and food systems.
The Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health Academy shares COVID-19 resources related to food systems, including a living, open-access map of experiences, perspectives, opportunities and questions from researchers around the world.
Nutrition Connect has a spotlight page bringing together news and resources related to the risks, responses, and impact of COVID-19 on food systems and nutrition.

A4NH launches Food Systems Idea Exchange

The CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) has launched the Food Systems Idea Exchange, where different voices can come together to explore the many issues around food system transformation. In a welcome blog post, the director of A4NH and leader of the Food Systems for Healthier Diets research flagship invite readers to engage in discussion about how to collectively guide food systems around the world through transformations to ensure we provide healthy, sustainable diets for all.

Kanayo Nwanze will represent a unified CGIAR at UN Food Systems Summit

Kanayo Nwanze, Chairman and Chief Executive of FAYODE and Compact2025 Leadership Council member, has been appointed CGIAR Special Representative to the United Nations Food Systems Summit slated to be held in late 2021. In this role, Dr. Nwanze will bring the voice of independent agricultural research and broad-ranging partnerships to the global forum.

ReSAKSS Data Challenge welcomes innovative entries

The ReSAKSS Data Challenge invites enthusiastic data users to showcase their creativity and analytical skills using data and other resources on the ReSAKSS website. Innovative knowledge products or projects that address a development challenge faced by Africa can be submitted in four categories: (1) essays and reports, (2) visual arts, (3) IT products and services, and (4) high school projects, and are due July 20.

Highlights from this and past Compact2025 News in Briefs, along with other key resources, can be found at the Compact2025 Knowledge & Innovation Hub resources page.

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