A network of researchers from different organisations shared insights from their ongoing/completed analyses of data on maternal and child nutrition at a one-day event
As India observes September 2018 as the National Nutrition Month to mark the country’s fight against malnutrition, over 130 members of the nutrition community in India met in New Delhi recently to deliberate on findings from the analyses of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data.
A network of researchers from different organisations shared insights from their ongoing/completed analyses of data on maternal and child nutrition at a one-day event on ‘Strengthening Actions for Nutrition in India: Insights from the National Family Health Survey’. The research findings presented at this event are expected to provide insights to inform POSHAN Abhiyaan (India’s national nutrition mission) and to shed light on areas that need to be addressed to improve nutrition outcomes in India.
The NFHS-4, fielded in 2015-16, and released to the public in February 2018, is a rich data set that provides vast amounts of data from all the districts in India and over 600,000 households. It has highlighted India’s progress on malnutrition, while also revealing the challenges that lie ahead. The research community has been diving into the data to unearth insights that can help understand the progress, identify reasons for the variability across India, and on the reach of policies and programmes. This event convened multiple researchers from organisations such as International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Brookings India, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS), Society for Applied Studies (SAS), Population Council and more, to feature their research on nutrition outcomes, determinants and reach of nutrition-related interventions.
The objective of this day-long event was to converge the emergent findings on a unified platform and rally stakeholders around these findings to encourage strategic investments that can further catalyse the improvements in nutrition outcomes.
Emphasising the role of data and evidence and the role that the research community can play to support India’s policy efforts in nutrition, Dr Vinod Paul, Member (Health) of the NITI Aayog said, “The high-quality data analysis presented by the network of researchers at this workshop will help us navigate the health and nutrition programmes, and understand the gaps that must now be closed. This network of researchers, coming together at this time when India is accelerating policy efforts to address malnutrition, can help the policy community to stay focused on addressing key risk factors and on closing gaps in intervention reach.”
“Through empirical analyses of data from the NFHS-4 surveys shared at this workshop, we want to collectively inform India’s policy efforts by bringing things together on the scope of the nutrition problem, the drivers of nutritional outcomes and the reach and scale of India’s programmes,” said Dr Shamika Ravi from Brookings
Dr Purnima Menon from IFPRI further added, “The research community must continue to distil and synthesise the insights emerging on each of the topical areas that India’s nutrition mission is focused on, and help to bring those insights back to the policy community to shed light on what’s working, what’s not working and what else needs to happen to make India malnutrition-free.”
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