Research Projects

• Millennium Villages
• Access Project
• CNHDE
• HIV/AIDS
• Tuberculosis
• Neglected Tropical Diseases
• Human Nutrition
• Community Health Workers
• Early Childhood Development
• mHealth
• eHealth
• Monitoring and Evaluation
• Support to the Health Extension Program of the Ethiopian Ministry of Health
• Nigeria OSSAP/LGA Conditional Grant Scheme
• Climate Risk Management and Public Health
• Haiti Project
• Tropical Lab Initiative
• Eliminating Mother to Child Transmission of HIV
• Oral Hygiene
• International Advisory Panel on the National Rural Health Mission of India
• Model Districts Project in India
• Ministerial Working Group

Human Nutrition

(More information: Global Food Systems)

Eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing maternal and child mortality, and achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are dependent on successfully addressing nutrition. Undernutrition is the underlying cause of 3.5 million child deaths per year and 11% of the global disease burden, as well as roughly one-third of the burden of disease for children. Micronutrient deficiencies undermine the health and productivity of over two billion people worldwide. This crisis requires a well-crafted response from local farmers, international health workers, and the global food industry.

CGHED’s nutrition program brings together leading global health and international development academics based at Columbia University, as well as expert groups working on international nutrition issues. Research themes include maternal and newborn health, malnutrition and infectious disease, food and nutrition security, and linking agriculture diversity, environment, industry and water with nutrition. Through collaborations with African and Asian counterparts, research results are shared to contribute to the knowledge and improvement of health in urban and rural settings across the world.

Nutrition and Food Security in the Millennium Villages:

In the Millennium Villages Project, the major nutrition objectives are to assist communities in eliminating hunger, increase nutrition security, and achieve the nutrition-related Millennium Development Goals. It is being achieved through innovative solutions, which are integrated and scalable.

Activities

1. Strengthening cross-sectoral operation-oriented research for nutrition, examples include:

• Assessing and addressing nutrient gaps in food systems
  • This research focuses on the questions 'What are the nutrient gaps in local food systems in the Millennium Villages sites to meet household needs? What are options for addressing these?' A set of tools is being developed into an integrated package that will 1) Determine food availability at the household and village level; 2) Estimate the minimum cost of nutritional food basket purchased at the village level and compare to household's income; 3) Calculate food and nutrient consumption (as well as the source of food – production or purchase) at the household level; and 4) Link results to nutritional status outcomes at household and village level. This integrated model is applied on Millennium Villages data and allows a nutrient gap analysis as well as evaluation of changes in food systems over time across different agro-ecological zones in sub-Saharan Africa.

2. Identifying determinants, drivers of change and emerging risk factors for nutritional security.

• Based on the UNICEF framework outlining the multiple determinants of undernutrition, an analytical model is being developed linking interventions and impact pathway indicators in health, agriculture, water and sanitation, education, community and gender to nutritional outcomes. Data from MVP sites are being analyzed according to this model. This model allows an analysis of malnutrition determinants as well as potential drivers of change and emerging risks across diverse settings in Sub-Sahara Africa. In addition, the analysis provides a set of indicators that can be further integrated with other datasets, e.g. environmental spatially explicit datasets.

3. Enhancing cross-sectoral science-based planning and decision-making for nutrition programs, examples include:

• Real-time monitoring and evaluation tools are being developed in collaboration with the e-Health, Monitoring and Evaluation, and engineering team to guide program management and planning (e.g. Childcount+; ODK; MVIS). Training sessions to utilize and improve these tools at the village level are being provided.
• An International Advisory Group on Agriculture and Nutrition for the MDGs (AGAN) provides a bridge between nutrition programs in the Millennium Villages and international and national nutrition policies and programs.
• Regional nutrition workshops, led by the MDG Centres in West and Central Africa and in East and Southern Africa bring together multiple sectors and stakeholders to strategize nutrition action plans for a diversity of settings in Sub-Saharan Africa.

4. Building and strengthening implementation systems for nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions. The MVP nutrition implementation strategy is cross-sectoral in nature, aims to address the multiple underlying determinants of malnutrition (see Figure) and has three main delivery systems: health facility-based programs, community-based programs and school-based programs. Example of implementation programs include:

• Expanding community-based participatory food and nutrition education programs for agricultural extension workers, health and education staff, and community health workers (CHWs).
• Human capacity building for nutrition in local communities, governments, health facilities as well as in universities.
• Diversifying and promoting consumption of traditionally nutritious African crops and foods and introducing new, improved varieties of foods.
• Increasing the use of appropriate technologies for the preservation and storage of food.
• Developing and ensuring cost-effective, nutritious school meal programs, nutrition education, school gardens, and health-nutritional status-growth monitoring check-ups in schools for all Millennium Villages.
• Creating nutrition support programs for vulnerable groups with a focus on HIV/AIDS and TB patients, orphans, widows and the elderly.
• Performing analysis of interventions by using tools such as Childcount+, food frequency questionnaires, serum micronutrient analysis, and anthropometric data throughout the project.
• Strengthening the linkages between agriculture, environment, infrastructure and health implementation systems for nutrition through joint planning tools, capacity building and delivery channels.

The Millennium Villages and the World Food Programme:

World Food Programme (WFP) and the Millennium Villages Project are partnering to end child hunger by creating “undernourishment-free zones.” The partnership applies coordinated, science-based best practices in nutrition and food security to demonstrate rapid progress across a range of established field sites in Africa. With the strategic leadership of WFP, the Millennium Villages Project can demonstrate quickly what works, through implementation research and rigorous monitoring and evaluation. CGHED’s nutrition experts and the MVP team work closely with the WFP to ensure the nutrition and food security successes of the partnership are translated into advocacy for scale-up at country, regional and global levels.

Global Food Systems

The Global Food Systems Initiative (GFSI) works towards a common goal of a sustainable global food system that is secure, equitable, feasible, healthy and environmentally sustainable for all human beings across the globe. Working in partnership with the Earth Institute’s Tropical Agriculture Program, CGHED combines a cooperative, multi-disciplinary approach across key sectors in which leading academics engage in a global dialogue on issues of food agriculture, nutrition and food security.

The hallmark of this initiative is the cooperative, multi-disciplinary approach employed to engage leading researchers and development practitioners at Columbia University in a global dialogue with farmers, consumers, industry and business leaders, nutritionists, chefs, ecologists, environmentalists, agronomists, international development workers, economists, rural sociologists, and policy makers. The resulting synergies inform approaches toward a sustainable global food system that is secure, equitable, feasible, healthy and environmentally sustainable for all human beings across the globe. The mission will extend beyond the roots of science and academia to ensure durable and resilient development and appropriate policy change. GFSI has global representation across Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe.

Activities

• Metrics and network for monitoring agricultural landscapes
  
  • With a wide range of partners, we have been working on the development of a global network to address these questions connecting a diverse and targeted spectrum of scientists, government actors, private sector leaders and other international stakeholders that will 1) develop a set of practical metrics that quantify social, economic and environmental outcomes of agricultural management and policy; 2) monitor these metrics systematically at a landscape scale across major agro-ecological, climatic and anthropogenic gradients; and 3) synthesize, analyze and disseminate these data to inform management, policies and research priorities.
• Biodiversity and nutrition
  
  • This research focuses on the questions 'What is the nutritional diversity provided by agro-ecological systems? What species/varieties play a key role in providing nutritional diversity? And how is this ecosystem service related to dietary patterns and nutritional outcomes?' A novel metric, nutritional functional diversity, has been developed to help address these questions and integrate nutrition in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment framework. Current research applies this metric to various settings and various scales and aims to make the new tools available as project planning and management tools.
• Ecology of cooking
  
  • Cooking serves as an entry point to examine multiple dimensions of sustainability within households in multiple settings, specifically their food consumption, their energy consumption patterns and their interface with the environment. This study unravels the multiple dimensions of cooking and identifies how different stresses interact in cooking and how the 'cooking poverty trap' can be escaped.

Contact
Please contact Roseline Remans with inquiries regarding Nutrition and Food System programs at the Earth Institute.