Data for Nutrition
The Challenge
The world has a clear mandate: To end poverty and malnutrition and achieve zero hunger by 2030. However, significant gaps and limitations in the availability of data on nutrition and food systems hinder change agents’ ability to make effective decisions and track progress.
Despite calls for data revolutions, data gaps and limitations are frequently cited as critical bottlenecks among nutrition and food systems stakeholders. Change agents around the globe need help answering key questions, including:
- What data is needed, and how can that data be effectively used, to support decision-making in nutrition and food systems, across global, national and subnational institutions?
- What is the status of nutrition and food systems in particular geographies, and how can data be used to inform strategic planning and financial investment planning efforts?
- What is the progress of particular nutrition and food systems programs and initiatives, and how can data be used to help track and improve their performance?
How can progress be measured and different parties be held accountable for nutrition and food systems efforts, at all levels?
Our Approach
Results for Development works with a broad range of actors to answer key data questions and to support change agents working to address malnutrition. We put users at the heart of all our efforts — our approach is demand-driven and aims to solve real challenges change agents are facing. We carefully design user-centered data monitoring tools and approaches for global and national change agents. Accompanying these products, we also strengthen processes and capacity in order to support increased uptake of data. Finally, we advocate for improved data in nutrition and food systems.
Over the last two years, our team has supported a variety of food-systems data efforts. In 2016, we developed a series of dashboards to support the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as it tracked the progression of agricultural transformation across priority countries. Building on this work, we partnered with Development Gateway and Wallace & Associates to conduct a scoping exercise to determine if an agricultural input dashboard could support decision-making to improve market efficiencies among stakeholders in Africa. Our team is also currently partnering with the Local Development Research Institute (LDRI) on a project to catalyze data-driven solutions for smallholder farmer fertilizer uptake. Through this project, we are piloting a new approach to incentivizing the collection and usage of key fertilizer data to accelerate the delivery of fertilizer to smallholder rural farmers.
Most recently, R4D has partnered with the Institute for International Programs at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (IIP-JHU) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Data for Decisions in Nutrition (DataDENT) project.
