Lao People's Democratic Republic’s Stakeholder workshop - Fostering use of dietary data in the policy making process

Collecting and disseminating reliable and accurate dietary data are the first steps to support formulating evidence-based policies and programs. FAO/WHO GIFT enables dietary data to be disseminated in a harmonized format that serves the needs at the highest possible level of decision-making.

This stakeholder workshop provided continuation of the work undertaken to share dietary data from the Lao People's Democratic Republic through FAO/WHO GIFT platform by presenting the platform to the end users – the policy makers - to raise awareness and promote the use of data in various domains and nutrition-related sectors: agriculture, planning and Finance, education fisheries, health and others; at national and provincial levels. 

During the workshop the development planners and policy makers learnt how to use the dietary data available in the platform in their day-to-day work, understanding the functions, displays and outputs that can illustrate the dietary data.

The workshop promoted the FAO/WHO GIFT platform as a source of evidence for the policy making process and explored the stages of the policy cycle in which dietary data can be used as evidence to support policy development. The lessons learned will guide further development of the FAO/WHO GIFT platform and future work promoting use of dietary data to inform policies and programmes in Lao People's Democratic Republic’s.