Photo credit: Chhandak Pradhan/Save the Children
Transform Nutrition will strengthen the content and use of nutrition-relevant evidence to reduce undernutrition over the next decade
Our research agenda
We’re focusing on the 1,000-day period from pre-pregnancy to 24 months of age. This is the window of opportunity, where interventions are most effective at reducing undernutrition, and the benefits of doing so are most enduring.
Our research agenda is structured around the following three questions:
- Nutrition-specific interventions
How can nutrition-specific interventions targeted at the window of opportunity be appropriately prioritized, implemented, scaled up and sustained in different settings?
- Nutrition-sensitive interventions
How can social protection, agriculture and women’s empowerment interventions become more nutrition-sensitive and have a greater impact on improving nutrition during the window of opportunity?
- Enabling environments for nutrition
How can enabling environments be promoted, and existing and enhanced political and economic resources be used most effectively to improve nutrition?
In addition, three cross-cutting themes permeate all our work:
- governance
- inclusion
- fragility
We see these three themes as crucial to maximising the impact of action to improve nutrition.
Background to our three areas of research
Nutrition-specific interventions
Considerable progress has been made in recent years in understanding the causes and consequences of undernutrition. However, approaches for scaling up direct interventions are not well understood. In particular, we need to know more about scaling up programmes that offer adequate quality and intensity, and that are targeted at the 1,000-day window of opportunity. Find out more.
Nutrition-sensitive interventions
Direct interventions alone will not be enough. The UK’s Department for International Development estimates that direct interventions will only address one-third of stunting prevalence. Broader-based indirect interventions are needed to tackle the underlying drivers of undernutrition. We need to know more about how to maximize the ‘nutrition-sensitivity’ of interventions such as agriculture, social protection and women’s empowerment. Find out more.
Enabling environments for nutrition
The basic causes of undernutrition have been neglected for too long. This is partly due to the perceived intractability of development policy processes to nutritional considerations and a lack of known traction points. It’s also partly due to undernutrition’s invisibility.
‘Enabling environments’ can be created, as we’ve seen with HIV over the last decade. We now need to learn more about how enabling environments can be created for nutrition, using innovative approaches to policy research. Find out more.
Download a PDF for an overview of the research we have planned.
