Global Partners Discuss Nutritional Goals at Virtual Convening

July 23, 2019

Kristen Dechert

Undernutrition among young children contributes to about 45% of deaths in children under five across the globe. Over 160 million children have stunted growth, or low height for their age, and 250 million have developmental delays due to poverty and lack of access to high-quality foods.

“The consequences of stunting are impaired child development across all domains—cognition, motor, language, and socio-emotional—as well as increased risk for infection, intergenerational effects, poor schooling outcomes, and lower adult productivity,” said Lora Iannotti, nutrition director for the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish (Fish Innovation Lab) and associate professor and associate dean for public health at Washington University in St. Louis, a managing partner of the Fish Innovation Lab.

Iodine, selenium, zinc, vitamin B12, and long-chain fatty acids are nutrients that are critically important to development, and fish can provide sustainable and affordable access points for families and communities.

To discuss food and nutrition security, the Fish Innovation Lab convened global partners on June 28 when lab leaders, country coordinators, and grant recipients discussed the connections between research projects and potential nutritional outcomes for global communities dependent on fish for food and livelihoods.

The second virtual convening this year, the meeting brought together principal investigators (PIs) and partners from all of its research projects, including researchers from Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria, the United States, and Zambia. Along with rich discussion of nutrition, meeting leaders aimed to nurture a sense of community and connectedness among the partners worldwide.

“My main objective is to increase the presence of nutrition as an outcome for all kinds of fish projects, including production, risk mitigation, food safety, value chains, and more,” said Iannotti. “This requires helping investigators understand the pathways to nutrition impacts and capturing outcomes on the way to human nutrition, not necessarily measuring the end results of child growth, development, or even improved diets in the household.” 

In addition to focusing on stunting, Fish Innovation Lab researchers also are addressing hidden hunger. Although communities may have access to food, if the food is not nutritionally dense, individuals are still at risk of impaired or delayed development, compromised immunity, and even death.

“The virtual convening gave researchers a chance to discuss differences across countries in the cultural practices of fish consumption that will be important for nutrition, such as who receives the optimal portion of the fish for nutrition—the head!—in the household,” said Iannotti. “Also, we discussed small fish and how these may be more accessible for poor households than larger fish.”  

One of many benefits of bringing partners together is “simply to learn from each other’s mistakes,” said Joanna Springer, monitoring, evaluation, and learning advisor for the Fish Innovation Lab and RTI International, a managing partner of the Fish Innovation Lab. “We are all working in difficult operating contexts and intervening in complex systems. Learning about failures as well as successes helps us all better understand how to engage in these systems responsibly and strategically,” she added.

To help facilitate discussion among attendees, Iannotti delivered an interactive presentation on nutrition and representatives from two projects presented ways they were including nutrition in their research.

From SecureFish, Kenya co-PI Elizabeth Kamau-Mbuthia discussed how her team was working to address undernutrition in children for Kenyan coastal communities, including understanding the cultural and familial meal habits for pregnant women and children under five years of age in several communities along the Kenyan coast.

Zambia co-PI Pamela Marinda discussed Fish4Zambia’s nutritional approach in their research design, with a special focus on how barriers for women to the aquaculture and fisheries fields can negatively impact access to fish and lower food and nutrition security for families.

Through these in-depth presentations, research teams and other attendees learned from one another’s approaches, successes, and missteps, and participants were given opportunities to reflect and contribute additional information both on a live discussion board and through video conferencing during the meeting.

“The learning goal for the [Fish Innovation Lab] is really to understand what works well for research for development, specifically in relation to fish production and consumption, fish livelihoods and the value chain, and the resilience of the systems that connect all of these,” said Springer. “These virtual platform meetings are one of the primary ways that grantees and partners connect and support each other to ensure each Fish Innovation Lab project contributes to our intended development impacts.”

Attendees and meeting leaders also discussed the interconnection of nutrition and affordability in the fish value chain and the importance of considering both economic feasibility and nutritional value, as well as cultural context, when choosing one or more species on which to focus their research activities. For example, researchers in Bangladesh emphasized that cultured fish are cheaper for families to purchase than wild-caught fish, an important factor in their work to cultivate rohu and other species in the country.

“Increasing supply of fish in the markets could help lower the price and improve availability and access to fish nutrition,” said Iannotti. “Food safety is critically important for nutrition because it reduces enteric infection [symptomatic as diarrhea] and, again, improves access. Improving livelihoods may lead to increased dietary diversity, another critically important nutrition outcome for improving health and development.”

The nutritional value of fish also is dependent on the prevention of loss after harvest, a challenge Fish Innovation Lab researchers are focusing on in Nigeria. As postharvest loss is improved, so too are the nutritional value and spoilage rates, and the cost to consumers is reduced, thereby making fish more accessible to families for consumption.

“Fish can be a source of livelihoods that can lead to increased income and assets leading to improved access to education, diverse diets, healthcare, and more,” said Iannotti. “Small holders in agriculture, livestock, and fisheries supply 80% of food in low-income countries; if support is provided for efficient production, this helps the environment, livelihoods, and well-being in communities.”

Finally, Iannotti, Springer, and other meeting leaders wanted to help stakeholders reach a shared understanding of the lab’s approach to nutrition by encouraging attendees to share knowledge and experience with one another and begin to discuss ways in which their projects and future work in the lab’s areas of inquiry could produce outcomes for those in the most vulnerable communities.

“Due to limited resources and short time windows, we often look at the potential nutrition impacts of our work as a given, when in reality benefits are unlikely to flow to the most vulnerable unless we undertake activities to ensure that they do,” said Springer. “This is important for Feed the Future, and a goal we want all our PIs to share.”

Research teams and lab leaders will meet again in early fall at the first U.S.-based platform meeting and will continue the discussion about nutrition, as well as the other cross-cutting themes of capacity development, resilience, and gender and youth equity.

For more information about the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish, please visit fishinnovationlab.msstate.edu or email the lab at fishlab@cvm.msstate.edu.