Discussion of climate change typically involves natural phenomena: raging wildfires, record flooding, ruinous drought. Less frequently examined, but equally important, is the effect of our warming planet on a child’s right to education.
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What does it REALLY take to ensure young children get the proper nutrition to grow strong and healthy? This is an especially important question in poor rural communities in Guatemala, where about half of the children under five years of age are stunted (too short for their age—a sign of long-term deficits in the quantity and/or quality of food, including the right vitamins and minerals). In some parts of western Guatemala, more than eight in ten young children are stunted.
Now there’s a new tool to help answer the question: Optifood is a computer software program, developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III Project (FANTA), and Blue Infinity, that provides scientific evidence on how to best improve children’s diets at the lowest possible cost using locally available foods. Optifood identifies nutrient gaps and suggests food combinations the local diet can fill—or come as close to filling. It also helps identify local foods’ limits in meeting nutrient needs and test strategies for filling remaining nutrient gaps, such as using fortified foods or micronutrient powders that mothers mix into infant or young children’s porridge.
The Government of Guatemala is fighting stunting through its Zero Hunger Initiative, which aims to reduce stunting by 10 percent by 2015 and 24 percent by 2022 through nutrition, health, agriculture, and social safety net programs. The U.S. Government and USAID are supporting these efforts through Feed the Future and Global Health Initiatives focused on the Western Highlands. USAID/Guatemala asked the USAID-funded FANTA/FHI 360 to help find strategies to improve the nutritional quality of children’s diets in the region. The challenge was to develop realistic and affordable diets for children that both meet their needs and are firmly based on scientific evidence. FANTA worked with its local partner, the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP), to collect the diet data needed for Optifood from communities in two departments of the Western Highlands, Huehuetenango and Quiché. FANTA then used Optifood to analyze the information.
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Women and girls: Beyond 2015
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We know what we can achieve.
And we know what needs to be done.
We know that improving access to family planning can reduce maternal and child mortality. Moreover, as long as women are unable to negotiate the number and spacing of their children, gains will be limited. We know that exclusive breastfeeding provides an infant the best start in life. Yet, evidence shows that a child born to a mother who has had access to quality education, especially secondary education, has a greater chance of surviving to see her fifth birthday than a child whose mother has no education. In countries around the world, we have reduced dramatically the incidence of HIV. Yet, gender violence and sexual exploitation will need to be addressed as part of the solution if we are to halt the spread of the disease.
Last week, the United Nations General Assembly debated the post-2015 agenda, and it has never been more clear that women and girls must be top of mind in the global development discussion. Only when we transform unequal gender norms will we be able to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. This means taking a broader approach than what we have done in the past by integrating gender concerns and putting women and girls front and center in every post-2015 priority.
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The latest figures on HIV infections, as reported this week by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), revealed an impressive 33 percent reduction in new infections among adults and children since 2001. To continue down the road to success, future efforts must address the gender inequities that contribute to the disproportionate impact of HIV and AIDS on women and girls.
More than half of the 35 million people living with HIV are women. In sub-Saharan Africa, almost 60 percent of people living with HIV are women. Young women between ages 15 to 24 are at highest risk of and most vulnerable to HIV infection. Closer to home, black women in the United States remain at high risk for HIV infection, and HIV-related illness is now one of the leading causes of death among black women between ages 25 to 34.
Gender inequity is a key driver of the epidemic, making women more vulnerable to HIV in many ways.
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Mobile money offers a unique opportunity for human development
An Interview with
John Zoltner, Technology Expert, FHI 360
What is mobile money? How does it work?Many people in developing countries, particularly in rural areas, do not have bank accounts or live near a bank branch. It can be difficult and expensive for them to make simple financial transactions, such as cashing a government check. Mobile money allows people to use mobile phones or other mobile devices, which are increasingly more available, to transfer money and make payments or deposits.
The mobile money process is straightforward. Local stores and businesses serve as “cash-in, cash-out” agents. In general, when users get funds sent to their phones, they receive a code that they show to an agent. The agent finds the code in a system and then allows the user to withdraw the funds. When users do not withdraw all of their funds, mobile money functions like a savings account. Mobile money systems differ by country, depending on the regulations governing electronic payments. It is a fast-changing field, because a wide variety of mobile financial products, such as savings accounts, are just now becoming popular around the world.
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Gender integration: Making it a reality
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Why has there been so much emphasis on gender integration? What does gender integration really mean, and how is it done?
Equal gender norms, roles and relations are key determinants of well-being across every aspect of human development. Gender inequality limits access to information, education, decision-making power, economic assets and health care. Women and girls are put at a great disadvantage because of unequal gender norms.
Research, especially in the health and education fields, shows that when efforts are made to address gender inequalities, individuals, communities and societies benefit.
At FHI 360, we use a Gender Integration Framework to provide practical guidance on how to analyze issues from a gender perspective and devise research and programs that identify and challenge gender-based inequalities that pose barriers to development.
FHI 360 conducts trainings at our U.S., regional and country offices to give our staff and leadership the capacity to put the framework into practice. Gender specialists throughout the organization help ensure that our research or programs integrate gender considerations at all stages of the project cycle — from planning and design to implementation and measurement.
This week in Tanzania, 28 technical staff from 17 FHI 360 country offices in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East will participate in our three-day gender integration workshop. The workshop will train these technical experts on how to use the framework and other tools and approaches in their day-to-day work. Participants will become Gender Focal Points, ensuring that gender remains front and center in our country and project offices.
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Today’s celebration of International Literacy Day 2013 is an opportunity for the international development community to reflect upon and reinvigorate its approach to ensuring that all children are able to read and write. In recent years, a shift from focusing primarily on access to an increased focus on learning, particularly foundation skills such as reading and writing, has been an important step for children worldwide. At the same time, the desire for quick fixes to reduce childhood illiteracy may be contributing to the development of approaches that are too narrowly focused and do not consider all of the factors that shape a child’s ability to learn to read and write.
Currently, the global education team at FHI 360 is implementing seven educational projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or Hess Corporation that focus on improving reading for children in early grades, in countries as diverse as Kosovo, Ethiopia and Peru. Although these projects differ according to their contexts, they are all rooted in the understanding that systems, schools, environmental and individual factors all play a role in creating a reader. This understanding is reflected in FHI 360’s approach to literacy improvement in primary schools: Literacy 360°. (See figure.)
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It is a common belief that programs designed to increase household income will automatically have positive effects on children. In fact, the evidence shows that this assumption cannot be taken for granted. In some cases, the interventions that increase household economic activities actually lead to greater problems for children and youth, such as more child labor and less school attendance, particularly in the short term.For the past five years, the Child Protection in Crisis (CPC) Network and the Supporting Transformation by Reducing Insecurity and Vulnerability with Economic Strengthening (STRIVE) project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and managed by FHI 360, have sought to understand how economic strengthening programs affect children living in poverty and in humanitarian crises. To better inform practitioners, they collaborated to create Children and Economic Strengthening Projects: Maximizing Benefits and Minimizing Harm, a new guide that explains how economic interventions can achieve better outcomes and impacts for children ages 0–18.
Rooted in field experience, the guide shows how to mitigate the unintended threats to children from economic strengthening activities and ways to maximize benefits to children, whether they are the direct or indirect beneficiaries. The guide draws on the extensive child protection expertise of the CPC Task Force, the STRIVE project’s experience in facilitating cross-sectoral collaborations, and recognized best practices for market-based economic strengthening programming.1
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The National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media was an invigorating three-day conference featuring the best and brightest in the health communication field. Held August 20–22, 2013 in Atlanta, GA, the conference featured plenaries, posters, breakout sessions, boot camps and networking opportunities all focused on the theme of “Waves of Change: Managing the Possibilities.”
Participants heard FHI 360’s Design Lab Director, Anne Quito, speak about the importance of design and creativity in health communication campaigns. FHI 360 staff also presented four posters that highlighted FHI 360’s Social Marketing and Communication work. The posters covered Geographic Information Systems tools; social media evaluation; paid media search campaigns; and use of social media to share information about dietary guidelines.
Below are my top five conference takeaways and quotes.
- The creative process begins and ends with empathy. — Anne Quito
- When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. — Ethiopian proverb
- Carve out creative time for yourself and colleagues each week for brainstorming and developing new ideas. — The Inspiration Shop conference session
- Real problems in our society are slow boiling pots of water. They warm up gradually until we’re cooked. — Victor Stretcher
- You can’t program a GPS unless you know where you want to go. — Katie Paine
To learn more, you can browse the robust Twitter conversations about the conference by using the hashtag #HCMMconf.
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In Vietnam, our Alive & Thrive project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has launched an innovative social franchise model – Mat Troi Be Tho – to provide high-quality nutrition consultation services. The franchise has been exceptionally effective in Vietnam where high malnutrition rates persist. The Mat Troi Be Tho brand signifies professional, trustworthy and high-quality services in a welcoming and child-friendly environment.
This is the first time that social franchise principles have been applied to infant and young child feeding counseling services. Counseling focuses on recommended feeding practices to optimize child growth and development in the first 2 years of life. Nearly 800 franchises have been set up in government health facilities throughout Vietnam.
Watch the video below to learn more about Mat Troi Be Tho and our Alive & Thrive project.
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With funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and under Project AIDE, FHI 360 has been improving the quality of education with a focus on early grade reading in Djibouti for the past four years. This video describes a component of the project which has transformed the national education information environment, initially at the Ministry and regional levels, and now at the school level.
As a result of this component, Djibouti now has a world caliber, internationally and locally responsive Education Management Information System that has been almost entirely operated by the local Ministry for the last two years. Although a small country, Djibouti has a fairly complex internal system of public and private schools that are now accommodated with 21st-century information systems.