Challenge
Food systems are not providing sustainable healthy diets for everyone, everywhere. Healthy diets are unaffordable for 3 billion people, and poor quality diets are associated with all forms of malnutrition and 11 million premature adult deaths each year.
Diets are rapidly evolving due to changes in income, women’s employment, and urbanization and developments in technology, food marketing and public policy. These changes, happening in urban and rural areas, contribute to shifts in food environments, which are increasingly promoting ready-to-eat, convenient, cheap and often ultra-processed foods associated with poor health.
Objective
This is the only CGIAR Initiative with the main goal of ensuring sustainable healthy diets for all through food systems transformation. Starting from an innovative, consumer-focused perspective, this Initiative aims to identify effective policy options through research; strengthen capacity; and develop robust metrics and tools that support stakeholders’ decisions when developing pathways to transform food systems toward sustainable healthy diets, improved livelihoods, gender equity, and social inclusion.
Activities
This objective will be accomplished through:
- Understanding consumers and their food environments by characterizing food consumption and dietary patterns among marginalized populations and identifying key drivers of inequalities, including between genders, to inform the co-design, testing and evaluation of scalable innovations in the food environment–consumer nexus.
- Generating knowledge about food-related small and medium enterprises (SMEs), micro enterprises and the informal food sector, and using this knowledge to identify and promote sustainable, scalable, evidence-based innovations and policies to help improve the quality of food and beverages offered to consumers while promoting increased decent employment among youth, men and women.
- Understanding the governance and political economy of food systems transformation by identifying the lock-ins and barriers that impede food systems’ contributions to healthy diets, fair livelihoods and sustainable environments, and proposing contextualized and evidence-informed governance and policy solutions.
- Conducting trade-off scenario analysis through development, testing and application of decision-support tools, and using those tools to raise the awareness and improve the capacity of stakeholders to navigate the potential trade-offs inherent in food systems transformation.
- Catalyzing food systems transformation by identifying, co-designing and supporting context-specific pathways for food systems transformation toward sustainable healthy diets.
Engagement
This Initiative will work in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Vietnam in the first phase, followed by India, Benin, Senegal, Guatemala and Honduras.
Outcomes
Proposed 3-year outcomes include:
- Stakeholders initiate implementation of at least two solutions (innovations or policies) to increase the demand for sustainable healthy diets and/or improve the ability of MSMEs and the informal sector to deliver sustainable nutritious foods in three target countries.
- Stakeholders initiate implementation of at least two solutions (innovations or policies) to tackle gender and youth equality and social inclusion in food systems in three target countries.
- Stakeholders show a significant increase in their ability to engage in governance and political economy issues and/or to navigate trade-offs in food systems transformation in three target countries.
- Stakeholders improve the design and implementation of the national roadmap towards food systems transformation for sustainable healthy diets in three target countries.
Impact
Projected benefits include:
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NUTRITION, HEALTH & FOOD SECURITY
Improved diet quality and safety, and an increase in the number of people in target countries who demand and can afford and consume a sustainable healthy diet, thereby reducing the burden of undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, diet-related non-communicable diseases and foodborne illnesses. This results in an additional 74 million people across eight countries benefiting from relevant CGIAR innovations (with 908,000 people meeting minimum dietary energy requirements and 47.9 million meeting minimum micronutrient requirements). |
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POVERTY REDUCTION, LIVELIHOODS & JOBS
New evidence and solutions to enhance employment among SMEs and micro enterprises and informal actors in the food system, including wholesalers, processors, caterers and retailers, benefit 9.8 million people across eight countries. |
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GENDER EQUALITY, YOUTH & SOCIAL INCLUSION
Evidence generated to address unequal access to healthy diets, employment and income and the inequitable processes and policies that create them, while focusing on poverty, gender and youth, and on how aspects of marginalization interact in different contexts, benefits 3.8 million women across eight countries. |
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CLIMATE ADAPTATION & MITIGATION
Reduced greenhouse gas emissions through shaping food demand via policy frameworks that incorporate climate considerations into trade-off analysis, and through reduced food loss and waste, benefit 68.7 million people. |
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ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH & BIODIVERSITY
Improved policy frameworks, the incorporation of environmental considerations into trade-off analysis, and increased demand for sustainably produced, biodiverse food bring 11.8 million hectares of land under improved management. |
Projected benefits are a way to illustrate reasonable orders of magnitude for impacts which could arise as a result of the impact pathways set out in the Initiative’s theories of change. In line with the 2030 Research and Innovation Strategy, Initiatives contribute to these impact pathways, along with other partners and stakeholders. CGIAR does not deliver impact alone. These projections therefore estimate plausible levels of impact to which CGIAR, with partners, contribute. They do not estimate CGIAR’s attributable share of the different impact pathways.
Partners
Partnerships are essential to the success of CGIAR Initiatives. The Initiatives will engage a wide range of different types of partners supporting demand, innovation and scaling, including academic, training and research partners; private sector partners; government and other public sector partners; multilateral organizations; foundations; international, regional, national and local NGOs; and public-private partnerships. Learn more about the Initiative’s partners.