Food System Innovations for Healthier Diets in Low and Middle-Income Countries

Malnutrition in all its forms is a major challenge everywhere in the world, and particularly in low and middle income countries. To reduce malnutrition, innovations in food systems are needed to both provide sufficient options for consumers to obtain diets with adequate nutritional value, and to help consumers make conscious and unconscious choices to choose healthier diets. A potential solution to this challenge is food systems innovations designed to lead to healthier diets. In this paper, we lay out a multidisciplinary framework for both identifying and analyzing innovations in food systems that can lead to improvements in the choices available to consumers and their diets from a health perspective. The framework identifies entry points for the design of potential food systems innovations, highlighting potential synergies, feedback, and tradeoffs within the food system. The paper concludes by providing examples of potential innovations and describes future research that can be developed to support the role of food systems in providing healthier diets

Institutional change and economic development : evidence from natural and artefactual field experiments in Ethiopia

Thesis title: Institutional Change and Economic Development: Evidence from Natural and Artefactual Field Experiments in Ethiopia Mequanint Biset Melesse Abstract Institutions are the essential underpinning of economic development. A large volume of empirical literature has documented conclusive evidence supporting this hypothesis. Yet, our knowledge on how to bring about institutional change and improvement is still quite imperfect. Moreover, putting in place good institutions that have undergirded the growth of the developed world has not always produced desired results in developing countries. This thesis studies the complex relationship between institutional change and economic development. Its primary focus is on the endogenous formation of institutions and outcomes of institutional changes on the quality and sustainability of other institutions and the dynamics of economic development. It employs randomized field experiments, propensity score matching and instrumental variables approaches to tackle the problem of causal inference. The results indicate that an effective institutional development requires a good knowledge of the interaction between formal and informal institutions and the complex dynamics that such interaction entails. Customary institutions are malleable. Local institutions condition the success and effects of formal institutional changes in important ways. Institutional change is a nonlinear, complex and non-ergodic process, where multiple intended and unintended outcomes are possible. Overall, the results indicate that formal and informal institutions interact out of entrenched corners with both constructive and deleterious repercussions for economic development

Aggravated food insecurity in COVID-19 era: Quality seed flow of adapted and nutrient-dense varieties is central to the recovery equation in the drylands

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every area of our daily activities and businesses. After the health crisis, the food crisis is the next battle to encounter, which will need to mobilize all energies to maintain social security and protect the citizens of the world. For sustained support and recovery of rural and urban populations, especially in the dryland areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, seed of the well-adapted, nutrient dense varieties should flow. The solution of quality seed flow equation is complex and involves several intervention areas, e.g., adapted and modern groundnut, chickpea, pigeonpea, sorghum and finger millet varieties, sustainable and long term approaches leveraging various seed production and delivery models, remote information and knowledge dissemination systems, digital seed production and delivery roadmaps, digitized variety release and promotion processes, smart food campaigns and trainings to promote good utilization of nutrient dense crops

Understanding urban consumers' food choice beavior in Ethiopia: Promoting demand for healthy foods

Using survey data collected from 996 representative households in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this paper documents several insights to help understand urban consumer food purchasing and consumption choices. The findings can be summarized as follows: 1) We find that households face important dietary gaps; a large proportion eats insufficient amounts of nutrient-dense vegetables, animal-source foods, and fruits. 2) The consumption of ultra-processed foods increases with income and may become a pressing health concern as incomes rise. 3) From a purchasing perspective, we find that consumers buy foods for different purposes at different outlets. Nearby kiosks and informal street markets are frequented for small food items and for fruits and vegetables, while formal open markets and consumer cooperatives are used for bulky food items. 4) Respondents make food and food outlet choices based on their health and food safety concerns, but few consider the nutritional value of food when purchasing it. Concurrently, the availability of a wide variety of healthy and safe foods is highly valued by most respondents for outlet choice. Among consumers in lower income categories, they tend to make food and food outlet choices based on prices and location convenience. 5) Although nutrition is not a primary concern when making choices about food, consumers appear to have reasonable nutritional knowledge. Most respondents considered a healthy diet to be primarily plant-based. Most people are aware that they should eat more fruits and vegetables and less sugary, fatty, and salty foods, but they have limited knowledge on the nutrient content of specific foods and the causes of obesity. 6) Labelling would not be an effective way to increase nutritional knowledge; most respondents have limited understanding of the information that labels provide. Rather, most respondents trust the information provided by health professionals over other sources. In sum, these results are potentially relevant for policy and the design of future programs for improving nutritional outcomes through enhanced diets

Food system innovations for healthier diets in low and middle-income countries

Malnutrition in all its forms is a major challenge everywhere in the world, and particularly in low and middle income countries. To reduce malnutrition, innovations infood systems are needed to both provide sufficient options for consumers to obtain diets with adequate nutritional value, and to help consumer make conscious and unconscious choices to choose healthier diets. a potential solution to this challenge is food systems innovations designed to lead to healthier diets. In this paper,m we lay out a multidisciplinary framework for both identifying and analyzing innovations in food systems that can lead to improvements in the choices available to consumers and their diets from a health perspective. The framework identifies entry points for the design of potential food systems innovations, highlighting potential synergies, feedback, and tradeoffs within the food system. The paper concludes by providing examples of potential innovations and describes future reserach that can be developed to support the role of food systems in providing healthier diets

Food system innovations for healthier diets in low and middle-income countries

Malnutrition in all its forms is a major challenge everywhere in the world, and particularly in low and middle income countries. To reduce malnutrition, innovations infood systems are needed to both provide sufficient options for consumers to obtain diets with adequate nutritional value, and to help consumer make conscious and unconscious choices to choose healthier diets. a potential solution to this challenge is food systems innovations designed to lead to healthier diets. In this paper,m we lay out a multidisciplinary framework for both identifying and analyzing innovations in food systems that can lead to improvements in the choices available to consumers and their diets from a health perspective. The framework identifies entry points for the design of potential food systems innovations, highlighting potential synergies, feedback, and tradeoffs within the food system. The paper concludes by providing examples of potential innovations and describes future reserach that can be developed to support the role of food systems in providing healthier diets

Food systems for healthier diets in Ethiopia : toward a research agenda

While dietary energy supply has improved, diets in Ethiopia remain low in diversity and provide insufficient amounts of protein, vitamin A, and zinc. Poor dietary quality contributes to the multiple burden of malnutrition in the country, with 38% stunting among children under five years and 24% anemia and 8% overweight among adult women.Recent Ethiopian government policies and programs call for sustainable food systems approaches aimed at achieving better nutrition for all. Such food systems approaches imply actions that include but also go beyond agriculture to consider the many processes and actors involved in food production, processing, storage, transportation, trade, transformation, retailing, and consumption.In this paper, we identify research streams to support the operationalizing of such food systems approaches in Ethiopia. To this end, we engaged with stakeholders, reviewed the literature, and applied a food systems framework to research priorities in the Ethiopian context. We develop an initial food systems profile of Ethiopia and identify 25 priority research questions, categorized into three main areas. A first area focuses on diagnosis and foresight research, for example, to further characterize dietary gaps and transitions in the context of the variety of Ethiopian settings, and to understand and anticipate which food system dynamics contribute positively or negatively to those trends. A second area includes implementation research and focuses on building a base of evidence on the dietary impact of combined demand-, market-, and supply-side interventions/innovations that focus on nonstaples; potential trade-offs in terms of economic, social, and environmental outcomes; and interactions between food system actors. A third area focuses on institutional and policy processes and explores enabling factors and private or public anchors that can take food systems approaches for healthier diets to a regional or national scale.The paper contextualizes the case of Ethiopia within global food systems thinking and thereby aims to stimulate in- and cross-country learning