Dear Facilitators,
The issue you raised is very important and timely which we must share our exprience to bring any value chain aproach to be nutrition sensitive. I would like to share those opportunities and challeges on VC approaches to be nutrition sensitive. I also attached 2020 conference paper 4 on value chain for nutrition for further reference.
Challenges and opportunities in developing VC to be more nutrition sensitive.
Value chain concepts and approaches are versatile to be used to address different goals if properly designed. Since the problem of malnutrition is multifaceted, its solution is also multi-sectoral in which it needs coordination of different actors along the value chain to achieve nutritional goal of the value chain intervention. I would like to list the following opportunities to be considered while developing value chains to be nutrition sensitive:
· By its own nature agriculture value chain analysis can help to address the issue of food availability and accessibility which are pivotal steps to improvement on nutritional status of the community. The value chain approaches can answer the question of why foods are not available in a specific community and it has also potential to solve the problem by identifying the root causes for why food is not available and accessible to that specific community.
· Value chain approaches have also potential to identify why certain nutritious food are less affordable than others and propose solution to make them more affordable to vulnerable group of the community
· Value chain approaches have also a potential to identify where and how the nutrient quality of the food changes throughout the chain and how nutrient losses can be prevented
· It has also a potential to increase demand and acceptability of nutritious food for the poor because it incorporates the notion of value from consumers perspective
· Value chains do have a cross-sectoral nature which has a potential to coordinate actions and actors from farm to fork. Value chain approaches can thus be used to identify and engage the sectors that need to be involved to improve the coordination between agriculture and nutrition.
The common challenges of most value chain approaches to nutrition
· The focus of value chain so far has been on adding value in the chain to create value to the value chain actors neglecting the poor consumers
· “Value” the attention is mostly given to economic value
· The focus on single food commodity neglecting dietary diversity
· The focus on competitive markets leaves out other markets.
· Most value chain approaches do not start with explicit nutrition goal
· Nutrition problems are not clearly defined within the value chain approach
· In most value chain program, they always consider only economic value. Nutrition value is always missed.
Sr. Mebit Kebede