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NENA Regional Network on Nutrition-Sensitive Food System – Policy Brief

Building resilience and protecting diets in fragile and conflict-affected contexts

Copyright licence

Year of publication 2021

Place of publication Cairo, Egypt ;

Pages 9p.

Author FAO

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Policy brief

Category Policy brief

Edition 1

Synopsis (short abstract) 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,

Last updated 02/06/2021

Cite this content as:

FAO. 2021. NENA Regional Network on Nutrition-Sensitive Food System – Technical Brief: Building resilience and protecting diets in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. Cairo.

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