Mokoro team members, Alta Fölscher (Team Leader), Christine Fenning and Stephen Turner, attended a Technical Gathering on the NIPN initiative in Paris from 3 – 5 July 2018. Over 60 participants from the ten participating countries (Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya, Laos, Niger, Uganda, and Zambia), as well as donor representatives and technical advisors, were present at this conference, which had been organised by the NIPN Global Support Facility staff.

The NIPN initiative was launched by the European Commission in 2015 and is also supported by the United Kingdom Department for International Development (UK DFID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). Its goal is to support countries that are part of the global Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement and are committed to deliver evidence-based programmes and interventions to improve human nutrition in their progress towards the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”. The main objective of the NIPN initiative is to create country-led and country-owned NIPNs to strengthen countries’ analysis of nutrition information to better inform policies and programmes for improving nutrition.

The Mokoro team are currently conducting a mid-term review of the NIPN initiative and were pleased to be able to interview the key stakeholders at this early stage of the review process and observe discussions. Lively discussions were held on how best to organise and analyse existing data and make it most useful and accessible for decision makers. Despite these ten countries coming from very different contexts, the need for a more systematic approach to (existing) data collection/compilation and the importance to policy and decision-makers was clear. The Mokoro team are now assessing how well things have been going so far. They will be carrying out further interviews with key stakeholders to add to those conducted in Paris. Later in July they will investigate two NIPN countries’ experience to date in more detail, with visits to Bangladesh and Guatemala.