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NENA Regional Network on Nutrition-sensitive Food System

Empowering women and ensuring gender equality in agri-food systems to achieve better nutrition - Technical brief










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    Meeting
    NENA Regional Network on Nutrition-sensitive Food System. CONCEPT NOTE and AGENDA
    9 November 2020, 11:00-12:30 (Cairo time)
    2020
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    Policy brief
    NENA Regional Network on Nutrition-Sensitive Food System – Policy Brief
    Building resilience and protecting diets in fragile and conflict-affected contexts
    2021
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    Crises, including those caused by conflict, disrupt regular community practices and essential services. Populations are often displaced, while food production, storage, processing, distribution and consumption can be significantly impacted. Likewise, caring and feeding for infants and young children can be disturbed, along with sanitary and healthy conditions. Malnutrition and hunger rates thus tend to raise and large amounts of people might lack the possibility to fulfil basic and immediate human needs, such as water and food. In crisis, the most affected ones tend to be infant and young children, pregnant and lactating mothers, elderly and disabled people. It is essential for emergency response and humanitarian aid to protect lives, restore livelihoods and rehabilitate food systems as fast as possible. During this period, it is also important to protect infant and young child feeding, and ensure meals for pregnant and lactating mothers are in sufficient quantity quality, safety and diversity. It is also important that elderly and disabled people received adequate support. It is important to ensure that humanitarian assistance and resilience operations adequately monitor the hunger and nutrition situation in order to prepare for, prevent and respond to degradations. Response should consider the needs of the most vulnerable groups such as women, children, elderly and disabled people. The well-targeted assistance with appropriate information and indicators can help reducing deterioration of nutritional status of vulnerable groups. Therefore, related assessments for should consider integrating nutrition information to determine the nutritional situation and develop better-targeted support. Assessment of the nutritional needs of different age groups; monitoring of the adequacy of dietary intake before, during and after the emergency; evaluation of the changes in food habits and practices, including coping strategies, are thus paramount. During emergencies, many children are admitted to specialized treatment centres (Therapeutic and Supplementary Feeding Centres) due to the acute and severe nutrition situation and receive life-saving support. Knowledge of nutritional requirements and proper feeding and caring practices is essential for the recovery of these children. However, families and caregivers often face difficulties in caring for children after the discharge due to the lack of knowledge on how to feed and care for children during humanitarian emergencies. Therefore, resilience and emergency response operations can add value by integrating nutrition education and improved feeding and caring practices for infant and young children as part of the interventions. The emergency operations that primarily look at the distribution of agriculture inputs (i.e. seeds, fertilizers,
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    Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet
    Improving nutrition of school age kids through nutrition-sensitive food system approach
    Near East and North Africa regional network on nutrition-sensitive agri-food - Technical Brief
    2021
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    The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) recognises that schools can make an important contribution in countries’ efforts to address food insecurity, poverty and tackle various forms of malnutrition. On top of the potential health, nutrition and education benefits with the latter being measured in terms of net enrolment rate, low dropout rates, better exam scores. Schools are ideal settings for food and nutrition programmes and services, because nutrition and education are closely linked and dietary, hygienic and exercise habits that affect nutritional status are formed during the school-age years. Many eating habits and behavioural patterns are developed during childhood and adolescent period. Schools can also be ideal for reaching large numbers of people, including youth, schools staff, families and communities. Children pass on the information that they received at school about good nutrition to their families and to the wider community. As children are widely perceived to be enthusiastic and able communicators both with their peers, families and wider community, if encouraged and appropriately informed, they can act as agents for change. As such, schools are great entry point for reaching into the community and promoting good nutrition, including proper hygiene and sanitation practices with life-long healthy habits. School food and nutrition interventions can include one or more of the following components: school gardens, school meals, school nutrition standards, school food and nutrition policies, food production linked to school food procurement, nutrition education in the school curriculum and improvements in water and sanitation, as well as other activities that contribute to improvements in school children's health and nutrition. Through all these complementary interventions pupils can improve their diets, develop healthier food practices and extend these to their families and communities.

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