WEBINAR: conceptual framework for addressing acute malnutrition in Africa's drylands

12 November 2020. Technical Series on the conceptual framework for addressing acute malnutrition in Africa's drylands. Hosted by FAO and Tufts University: Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

Objectives: To present the Global Action Plan (GAP) on Child Wasting and stress the urgency of developing radically improved approaches for addressing persistent acute malnutrition in Africa’s drylands, shaped by a new understanding of the basic more systemic drivers of malnutrition. This panel demonstrated the complementarities and linkages between stakeholder responses, working across systems and disciplines and connecting institutions from the community level upwards in order to meet the nutritional needs of women and children.

• Patrizia Fracassi, Food and Nutrition Division, FAO
• Bibi Giyose, Senior Officer Nutrition and Food Systems & Advisor to the CEO, NEPAD
• Saul Guerrero, Senior Nutrition Advisor, Emergency Nutrition, UNICEF
  
• Nora Hobbs, Deputy of Systems Analysis for Nutrition, WFP
• Zita Weise-Prinzo, Department of Nutrition and Food Safety, World Health Organization
• Moderator: Helen Young, Professor and Research Director, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Feinstein International Center

Young, Helen. Nutrition in Africa’s drylands: A conceptual framework for addressing acute malnutrition. Boston: Feinstein International Center, Tufts University, 2020. 25 pp.

 

This brief reviews and updates the generally accepted conceptual framework of drivers of acute malnutrition in Africa’s drylands, where emergency levels of global acute malnutrition stubbornly persist. 

The revised framework preserves the immediate and underlying drivers of acute malnutrition and recognizes the synergism between them. More fundamentally, the updating reconceptualizes the basic more systemic drivers of acute malnutrition to include three interlinked areas: 

1. environment and seasonality; 
2. systems and institutions; and 
3. livelihood systems.

While this report is specifically about Africa’s drylands, 43% of the globe is classified as drylands and therefore may be relevant in other contexts.

In this video, Helen Young explains the urgency for better understanding the basic drivers of malnutrition, describes the adapted framework, and introduces this technical series.