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Centre for Development, Environment and Policy (CeDEP)

Bhavani Shankar and Nigel Poole from CeDEP, SOAS attend the LANSA programme in Chennai, 11-15 February

26 February 2013

Together with colleagues Alan Dangour and Elaine Ferguson from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, they make up the team from the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health, which is situated within the London International Development Centre. The multidisciplinary, multinational team will be examining how agricultural development efforts can be linked to improve nutrition and health outcomes in four South Asian countries, where nutrition standards of vulnerable groups are among the lowest in the world: nearly half of all South Asia’s young children are stunted, and the rate of progress in reducing under nutrition has slowed to a crawl in the past decade. Ensuring nutrition security in the region can only occur through a combination of direct nutrition interventions and indirect interventions such as broad-based agricultural growth. The core question that LANSA will address is:
“How can South Asian agriculture and related food polices and interventions be designed and implemented to increase their impacts on nutrition, especially the nutritional status of children and adolescent girls?”
There are three pillars to the research, which will investigate:

  1. How enabling is the wider context in linking agriculture and food systems to other determinants of nutritional status?
  2. How can the nutrition impacts of agriculture and agri-food value chains be enhanced through appropriate strategies and policies?
  3. How strong is the evidence that agricultural interventions can be pro-nutrition?
Bhavani Shankar and Nigel Poole from CeDEP, SOAS attend the LANSA programme in Chennai

 

Bhavani and Nigel are working primarily on pillar 2. Research will include a mix of analyses of secondary data, and collection and analyses of primary data, on agri-food policies, interventions, health data and value chains.

Three cross-cutting themes affecting the agriculture-nutrition nexus are:

  • innovation systems to bridge the divide between agriculture and nutrition
  • women's empowerment in agriculture and nutrition and in the value chains which link both sectors
  • fragile institutional and environmental contexts which hinder policies and interventions

In addition to LCIRAH, colleagues involved in the research programme come from a range of other institutions in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and elsewhere:

 

It was a particular pleasure to welcome one new colleague at the workshop, Ms Samar Zuberi, a SOAS 2012 Alumna of the MSc in Development Studies, and now works for CSSR in Karachi.

Afghanistan is the fourth country included in the research, where issues of 'gender' and 'fragility' are so publicly evident. One of the tasks is to identify partners in Kabul and elsewhere who are willing and able to participate in primary research in the challenging security environment, with increasing uncertainty likely after the forthcoming withdrawal of Western troops.

Source: Nigel Poole

For further information, contact:

Bhavani Shankar: b.shankar@soas.ac.uk
Nigel Poole: n.poole@soas.ac.uk
LCIRAH: http://www.lcirah.ac.uk/
LIDC: http://www.lidc.org.uk/