FLAGSHIP 4

Flagship 4: Supporting Policies, Programs, and Enabling Action through Research (SPEAR)

               Flagship 4 Note

This Flagship Program seeks to address major gaps which remain in our understanding of the agriculture-nutrition disconnect-- that is, the relatively small changes in nutrition in places (especially low- and middle-income countries) with high dependence on agriculture-based livelihoods and large changes in agricultural policy and practice.

To learn more or engage directly with this Flagship Program, please contact Flagship Leader Deanna Olney.

SPEAR builds on A4NH's resources, capacity, and experience with global and regional initiatives in Africa and South Asia to support countries in tackling these goals. This work is organized into three Clusters of Activities (CoA):

CoA1: Nutrition-Sensitive Agricultural Programs (NSAP) focuses on understanding and documenting the contribution of integrated agriculture and nutrition programs to improvements in maternal and child nutrition in order for development program implementers and investors (governments, NGOs, UN institutions) to use the evidence, tools, and methods to design and implement cost-effective nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs at scale and for researchers and evaluators, including in CGIAR and other CRPs, to use evidence, tools, and methods to design high-quality evaluations of nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs and other multisectoral programs, and strengthen the evidence base.

Major projects undertaken to understand and improve gender- and nutrition-sensitive programming include:

• The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), which works with a portfolio of agricultural development projects to adapt and validate a measure of women’s empowerment for use by agricultural development agencies and project implementers to diagnose key areas of disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment.

The Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) suite of tools, developed under GAAP2, is one of CGIAR's best innovations from the past 50 years. Click here to learn more.

• Evaluating and Improving Helen Keller International’s (HKI’s) Homestead Food Production programs, which built on a collaboration between HKI and IFPRI to redesign, implement and evaluate more comprehensive nutrition-sensitive agriculture program packages designed to further increase program effectiveness. The work included studies of: program impact on children’s health and nutrition outcomes; women's nutrition and empowerment outcomes; how changes in women's empowerment decreased child wasting; and the association between program impact on women's time use and maternal and child nutrition outcomes, among others. In addition, process evaluations were conducted in Cambodia and Burkina Faso to understand how and why the program model works and how it could be improved
• Impact evaluation of integrated poultry value chain and nutrition interventions (Se Lever) in Burkina Faso
• Targeting and Realigning Agriculture for Improved Nutrition (TRAIN)
• Women improving nutrition through group-based strategies (WINGS)
• Urban food systems for better diets, nutrition, and health

Key publications from projects under this cluster include:

• Measuring the impact of agriculture programs on diets and nutrition. Leroy et al, 2020
• New evidence on nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs. Ruel, 2019
• Leveraging an implementation–research partnership to improve effectiveness of nutrition-sensitive programs at the World Food Programme. Olney et al, 2019 (Learn more about this work in this blog)
• Ending undernutrition requires a different focus on stunting. Leroy, 2019

CoA2: Supporting Countries through Research on Enabling Environments (SCORE) focuses on understanding how enabling environments—such as policies, institutions, and governance—for nutrition can be created and sustained so that regional, international, and UN agencies and initiatives, as well as investors, can use evidence, tools, and methods to inform decisions and investment strategies to guide and support nutrition-sensitive agricultural programming and nutrition-sensitive policies and so that national policymakers and stakeholders from different sectors, civil society, and industry can use evidence to design effective nutrition-sensitive policies and strategies to enable effective programming.

Major projects undertaken to enhance the policy environment include:

• Stories of Change in Nutrition

Stories of Change in Nutrition is one of CGIAR's best innovations from the past 50 years. Click here to learn more. 

• Transform Nutrition West Africa
• POSHAN (Partnerships and Opportunities to Strengthen and Harmonize Actions for Nutrition in India)
• Advancing Research on Nutrition and Agriculture (ARENA)

Key publications from projects under this cluster include:

• Impacts of COVID-19 on child malnutrition and and nutrition-related mortality. Headey et al, 2020
• Cost and affordability of nutritious diets at retail prices: Evidence from 177 countries. Bai et al, 2021
• Affordability of the EAT-Lancet diet: a global analysis. Hirvonen et al, 2019

CoA3: Capacity, Collaboration, Convening (3C) focuses on strengthening capacity to use and demand evidence, and on providing a bridge to other flagships, CRPs, and relevant national, regional, and global processes in order for stakeholders from different sectors, civil society, and industry, including CGIAR and other CRPs, to have improved capacity to generate and use evidence to improve nutrition-sensitive agricultural programming, nutrition-sensitive policy making, and implementation.

Major projects undertaken to build capacity and improve leadership include:

• Ongoing engagements with the Rome-based Agencies, including IFAD, FAO and WFP, which included the development of a value chains for nutrition framework and series of project design guides for implementation, as well as an e-learning course.

Work on the Value Chains for Nutrition framework and project design guides is one of CGIAR's best innovations from the past 50 years. Click here to learn more. 

• Voices for Change Partnership (V4CP), for which SPEAR researchers worked with SNV and CSO partners in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Rwanda, and Indonesia. A few examples of briefs produced under this project include those on adolescent nutrition and the inclusion of gender, poverty, and disability in nutrition policy in Indonesia, and on the impact of agriculture-nutrition interventions on women's time use in Burkina Faso.
• The Knowledge for Implementation and Impact Initiative (KI3), which included a systematic mapping of organizations KI3 researchers undertook a systematic mapping of organizations or initiatives that provide knowledge on how to optimally implement nutrition interventions. The systematic mapping was the first exercise of its kind. The research team screened hundreds of entities that work on nutrition and then collected extensive data on their characteristics, including their countries of operation, funding sources, nutrition aims, type of knowledge resources provided, phase of implementation their work contributes to, tools used to disseminate the work, and more. The attachment provided here is the resulting systematic map, and contains all of the data collected for analysis. If you would like more information on the map, please contact Roos Verstraeten.

Key publications from projects under this cluster include:

• What is the role of civil society in multisectoral nutrition governance systems? A multicountry review. Busse et al, 2020
• A review of leadership and capacity gaps in nutrition-sensitive agricultural policies and strategies for selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Aryeetey et al, 2020

Below is a visual depicting the Flagship 4 impact pathway.

Read more about Flagship 4 and A4NH's work on Supporting Policies, Programs, and Enabling Action Through Research, as well as other news and updates on this topic.