Nutrition Innovations
The Challenge
Despite a clear mandate to end malnutrition by 2030, every third person in the world is malnourished today, and it is estimated that one in two will be malnourished by 2030. A big reason for this is poor nutrition and unhealthy diets. Existing efforts to address key nutrition challenges can and will achieve a lot, but innovative solutions must be identified and scaled up as well given the size and scope of the problem.
We need innovations in food production and supply chain management, in approaches to changing consumption behaviors, and in approaches to service delivery and data collection. When supported and deployed effectively, innovations have the potential to increase impact by lowering costs, increasing access to essential goods and services for underserved populations or improving the effectiveness of existing programs and approaches.
Our Approach
Results for Development brings significant experience promoting the identification, adaptation and integration of innovative solutions to address systemic challenges in health, agriculture and WASH to the nutrition sector. We provide insights and support to change agents — from global funders to social entrepreneurs and innovators — who seek to foster innovation and drive transformative change. We work with our partners to answer the following questions:
- What are the systems challenges that require innovative policies, products and/or approaches?
- How can donors identify and scale up high-impact nutrition innovations?
- How can policymakers and other decision-makers integrate high-impact nutrition innovations into their efforts?
- How can we foster collaborative learning opportunities among various stakeholders to address shared challenges and generate knowledge that will be useful to many?
- How can adaptive learning approaches be used to generate timely evidence to help programs become more effective and achieve greater impact at scale?
A few examples of our work include:
- We conducted a landscape analysis of the potential for diet innovations in the Indo-Pacific region to advise Innovation Xchange (iXc) at Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) on their next round of investments in nutrition and healthy diets
- We collaborated with Grand Challenges Canada to develop methods to model the potential impacts of innovations they fund. Decision-makers may use this approach in deciding whether or not to innovations, tracking progress, sharing results with wider audiences and identifying key drivers of an innovation’s impacts.
- We partnered with DFAT and USAID to fine-tune both the design and implementation of the LAUNCH Food accelerator program, a program that aims to source and support high-impact, innovative solutions that enable people to make healthy food choices.
- We worked with the Local Development Research Institute (LDRI) to develop an agricultural input dashboard that will support decision-making to improve market efficiencies among stakeholders in Africa.
