This Nutrition and Food Systems Implementation Plan is a multilateral sectoral document aiming at catalyzing and supporting the Vision of Agenda 2063 of eliminating hunger and food insecurity by enabling Member States to address malnutrition more effectively. With this Implementation Plan, AUDA-NEPAD’s vision is to reduce hunger and malnutrition by 25 percent by 2025. Malnutrition will be tackled in all its forms, including chronic under-nutrition in children under 5 years, anemia in women of childbearing age, low birth weights, overweight in children under 5 years of age and women, exclusive breastfeeding during the first six months, undernourishment, and childhood wasting. To achieve this Vision, the Plan sets out the following overarching goals (i) to be a strategic program for the AUDA-NEPAD Agency to foster alignment and harmonization of agriculture, food systems, and nutrition programs in Africa at different levels; (ii) to use agriculture as an entry point to promote coordination, complementarity, and synergies, between and across the different initiatives; (iii) to promote the development of the human resource, research capacity, and evidence to support nutrition actions at national and AU. The proposed strategies are (i) accelerating agriculture's impact on nutrition through increased dietary diversity and related improvements in nutrient adequacy and quality of diets; (ii) promoting maternal and young child nutrition through advocacy of essential nutrition interventions; (iii) supporting better school feeding programs that at the same time support the production and market creation for smallholder farmers; (iv) developing nutrition and food systems professional capacity for planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of nutrition action; (v) generating and sharing strategic knowledge including management lessons on best practices. To promote the production, the actions shall be directed to (i) increase smallholder productivity and improve responses to food emergencies; and (ii) link the local small producers to markets (in particular, schools) to stimulate agricultural production and development. In the food field, the Plan focuses on both security and safety aspects, in particular, it recommends (i) promoting improved maternal and young child nutrition; (ii) promoting food fortification, biofortification, and supplementation to prevent and reduce micronutrient deficiencies; (iii) promoting dietary diversity, adopting a better value chain approach from farm to plate; (iv) promoting home-grown school feeding programs; (v) promoting food safety, regulatory and quality management frameworks; (vi) promoting better standards and build capacity including legislation to generate, monitor and enforce legal frameworks; (vii) galvanizing community engagement with nutrition to drive demand for nutrition foods and healthier diets; (viii) adopting the Codex Alimentarius collection of internationally recognized standards as a reference points for adhering to food safety thresholds; (ix) controlling food safety along the food system including supply chains from production to processing, trade, preparation and consumption. For more inclusive economic and social growth, the main interventions are as follows (i) initiatives to address the interlinkages between communicable diseases, NCDs, maternal and child health, and socio-economic development; (ii) convening stakeholders from across all sectors in the food system to promote a multi-sectoral approach to addressing malnutrition and to build political will and commitment; (iii) fostering equity and inclusion since nutrition acts as a platform for better outcomes in health and education, employment, female empowerment, and poverty reduction; (iv) nurturing the biocultural heritage and traditional knowledge that underpins much of the world’s agricultural biodiversity. As for Governance, the following objectives need to be achieved (i) improved institutional arrangements to ensure the development, alignment, and coordination of food and nutrition security policies and programs; (ii) improved policies that align nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive dimensions; (iii) improved programs emanating from these policies; (iv) improved implementation of these programs; and (v) improved surveillance to ensure ongoing monitoring, evaluation, and learning. Further institutional interventions are (i) promoting better governance of food environments to address overweight and obesity; (ii) providing technical backstopping particularly for ensuring policies and programs become nutrition-sensitive; (iii) strengthening capacity at all levels and in the range of activities required to implement this agenda.
2019-03-01