 Ie, we are going to give an overview of some of the findings of the agri-�-rwdy-art project. I'm just going to very briefly introduce it and then I'll be handing over to colleagues who have been involved in the agri-thart team. Initially, we're going to present some of the socio-economic findings and then some of the findings from nutrition surveys felly mae'n gweithio ei gael yn sefydlu'r iawn o'n gweithio'r gweithio, felly mae'n edrych i'r rhaid i'r gweithio. Mae'r gweithio'r gwneud ar y gallu'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Felly mae'n gweithio'r gwneud o'r gweithio'r collegau o'r gweithio'r Gwyl Jamal Hasan, o'r Gwyl Jamal Hasan, o'r Armaeiei Gwyl Jamal. Mae'n ddod â'r gweithio ar agrodat. Felly yn ei gweld gydweithio llawer o hyn o'r rhaid i'r effeithio sydd o'n cyfrifianiad o'r ffynu a'u gweithio i y 페ist. Fe oed o fynd i'n ffynu i'r Ffeithio a Gweithio i'r Cyngorau, yn Gweithreifol, yn Cwunio Ion Wysg Blydd i'r Fffeithio Gweithreifol yn Cyfrifianiad. Fe oed o'r eu cyfrifianiad o'r Ffeithio Cymru i dyn nhw i'r Llyfrgell. Yn gyfnod i Gwneud yr iddoedd, sefydlu gyda'r holl blynyddiaeth mewn gwirio'r argyffredigau yma ar gyfer y Gymraeg yw'r awrgrif iawn, ac yn cael ei hwn i'r gwirio'r gweithio'r gwirio'r awrgrif iawn ar y gwaith, so mae'r llehau ar y fzesion. Felly, fyddwn yn fawr i'r gwirio'r awrgrif iawn ar gyfer y gwirio'r awrgrif iawn. First of all, I think we need to acknowledge our shade support. As Tom said, it's been fantastic the support that our shade has given to a whole range of nutrition related activities over the last few years and this has sort of been part of it within the research field. So agrodig has been a research project, the overall goal to contribute to poverty reduction through the identification of policies and interventions that can make a positive impact on the nutritional status of vulnerable rural households. It's been a three-year research project so effectively the project is kind of more or less come to an end, except that we still have some PhD students who are analysing their data. But we regard today as a sort of, you know, a dissemination event in Ireland of where we are up to now and giving the sort of major findings up to now, but we will have some more analysis ongoing, particularly through the PhD students. There have been eight research partners used to see has led the agrodig, but we've partnered, I think, very effectively with UCD, with IDS, with two universities in Ethiopia, that's Haramir and McKelley, and also the Ethiopian Development Research Institute in Ethiopia and then with, in Tanzania, South Wales and St Augustine's University. So it's been eight partner institutions, been quite a challenge to sort of coordinate all of that, but we feel it's worked pretty well. It's been observational research. We haven't been trialling interventions as such. What this has really been about has been trying to understand the linkages between agriculture and nutrition. And I think, as a sherry on a minute, we've done this at sort of different levels, but perhaps, you know, we're sort of filling in some of the fine-grained detail that I think, you know, if you like results in a country in the Lawrence's report being on course or off course, I think we're looking at the sort of district level and household level detail of what this link between agriculture and nutrition actually is. And we kind of think it's valuable from that point of view. These are the aggregate objectives. So basically, there have been objectives related to policy, how effective has policy been, how much relevant policies such as in agriculture and health address nutrition. We've had objectives looking more at the various factors that influence local agricultural practices and what that means for nutritional status at household level. So those objectives have been very much household level and essentially primarily done through the PhD work, as you've mentioned to our PhD students are here at the bank from Ethiopia. We have had objectives around facilitating the creation of a stakeholder network and Jessica will talk more about that. So we've had stakeholder meetings in both countries, both at national level and district level. And then another objective was to build capacity of partners around mobilising knowledge and the evidence base. So it hasn't been pure research. It's been very much applied research at different levels but with a policy influencing component as well. Eight work packages. You can see them there. We had a sort of initial overview state of the art overview that Lawrence and Jessica actually did. We've had country policy studies of both countries in Ethiopia and Tanzania. We developed a sort of methodological conceptual framework. I'm sorry, in a minute. We had miso level research on value chains for high value nutrient rich commodities. We've had the household level detailed work done by both socio economic students and nutritional students. We've had we carried out reviews of agricultural nutrition projects. We did the stakeholder workshops and we've had knowledge mobilisation activities. That's conceptual framework. I'm going to go into that but just to say it's kind of derived from the UNICEF conceptual framework that some of you may be familiar with on the sort of causes of nutrition and we built the work packages around that. So we looked particularly at the national policy miso level as we called it which included value chains and then the household level both from as livelihoods or socio economic and nutritional perspective. Excuse me. That's the website. We produced a number of briefs. I think you would have received them in your packs today but there's more reports and copies of all the briefs are up on the website if you want to have a look at that. As I mentioned, we're still doing quite a bit of the research and I think particularly one of the things we're interested in is doing more detailed integrated analysis between the agricultural data that we have and the nutrition data that we have. So that's something we'll be doing over the next few months. So I think that on further ado, I'll pass over to Jamal first and then to Joyce to get to talk about some household level findings. So I'll be presenting the social economic household lived survey conducted in both countries by four PhD students. As much as possible, I'll try to give the general highlight within 15 minutes time. So it reads agricultural nutrition link in Ethiopia and Tanzania household level social economic finding from the agri diet project. The overall objective of this component of the project is to explore the relationship between agriculture production, livelihood system and dietary outcome. And we have three specific objectives for that. First one is to understand local agriculture production and livelihood system. And the second one is to examine household food consumption in terms of dietary diversity. The third one is to analyse the relationship between household nutritional status measured by dietary diversity and key agriculture and other socioeconomic characteristics. As with regard to the methodology, there is similarity between the methodology we used in both countries. We focused on two study areas in Ethiopia, northern part of Ethiopia and in in Aromia. We selected four research site in total, two from each location that we considered 400 households in each study area plus key informant interviews and observations. Data were collected twice in worrying from the same respondent that is immediately after harvest and in the late season. We used mixed method of analysis, qualitative and quantitative. And we considered as I said already similar approach in Tanzania, two study areas in Morogoro and Chiangana region. We selected two village per region and total 250 respondents in each region. With regard to socioeconomic characteristics in case of Ethiopia, it's a small land size. It's one of the key defining features of the sample respondent. For instance, in Aromia, the average land holding size was 1.14 hectare and it's even lower in case of Tigray, which is 0.84 hectare. You can imagine how small it is. Livestock holding is also very low. For Aromia, it's 3.5 tropical livestock units and for Tigray, it's four tropical livestock units per household. Then the major difference in both land and livestock ownership between male and female-headed households, female-headed households tends to have smaller than that of the household led by female. And limited access to irrigation is another characteristics. Only 16% of the sample household had access to irrigation. And somewhat access to irrigation is also quite small, which is about an average of 0.36 hectare. Then there is predominance of serial production in Tigray in northern Ethiopia, whereas in case of Aromia, that is more of a cash dominated production, like cutting and groundnut. There is low serial yield with some little variation in specific carbonates. For instance, average yield in total was about 813 kilograms per hectare. This is when we are making relative comparison between the city sites and similar yield is observed in Aromia. Then we found the highest yield in case where they had access to irrigation like in case of Maserat. The resizable cash income in the form of non-farm income source, in Tigray, more than 50% income come from non-farm sources. In case of Aromia, 33% is from non-farm. In case of Aromia, a groundnut is making huge contribution, which is about 63.7%. It accounts for about 29% of the overall farm income. But many of the households are selling food produce with high nutritional value instead of consuming, such as milk and egg. Cash income again for a male-headed household is more than that of a female-headed household, which is about like 1.5 times that of a female-headed household. Most households experience food shortage, like 61.6% of households experience food shortage at least one month per year. Households on average run out of food for more than one month and a female-headed household had more months of food shortage than a male-headed household. The diets are dominated by cereal, like food accounts for 77% of the household expenditure, and animal-based food is quite small. It's about 80%, and foods are even quite smaller, about 4.2% food expenditure. All indicators we considered in assessing food security shows significant seasonal difference in food security of the household, in terms of household dietary diversity, food consumption score, and also in terms of household coping strategy index. All shows seasonal variation. We found there is a high production diversity association with a high dietary diversity associated with high dietary diversity that is the more they produce diversified food, the more tendency to be having access to diversified diet. A large majority of the household in Oromia, which is about 8.82.5%, with low dietary diversity produced three or less type of crop in a year. Households with the highest diversity produce more than for crop type, and we conducted econometric analysis specifically ordered probits, which indicates dietary diversity of the household being positively and significantly associated with number of crop grown and number of livestock owned, a size of cultivated land, co-ops membership, and education status of the household head. In case of household size, we found dietary diversity being negatively associated with the household family size. Then coming to the determinants of dietary diversity, we also considered multivariate linear regression analysis to analyze relationship between dietary diversity and the various socio-economic factors. Then age of the household head was negatively associated with dietary diversity. Education of mother land, cultivated land, use of irrigation was positively associated with dietary diversity. The integrated analysis is still in progress, but from the preliminary finding we found child standing positively associated with non-food expenditure, and child standing also being negatively associated with age of mother and the dietary diversity of mother, but further integration analysis is still in progress. Coming to the recommendation of Ethiopia, we have at least like about three recommendations, intervention aiming at ensuring food and nutrition security needs to pay attention to seasonality, gender difference, and the unique characteristics of different agroecologies. We are saying there's no like even blank recommendation that fits a particular country's context. Importance to focus on diversity of production and improving knowledge and nutrition. Then agriculture productivity needs to be increased through continuing investment in different activities like water conservation and so on and so forth. Then animal source food needs to be given prior attention. We are also considering recommending the need for consistent messaging and coordinated action between agricultural extension officers and other stakeholders like community health workers, and we are also recommending collective organization can boost food availability and return to farmers. In case of Tanzania, like I've already said, we are also we considered two study locations, Kishapu and Merodistrict. In case of Tanzania, we have four main farming systems, which is the first one is mixed crop livestock farming system, and the second one is cash crop dominated farming system and the mixed food crop farming system and the single food crop farming system. These are what has been found as the major characteristics of Tanzania. Generally in case of Tanzania also there is low income and 90% of the population earn less than median income for Tanzania, as I've already said, and high and equal income distribution and considerable period with no cash income whatsoever, the source might be found in in the two locations. And farmers versus, with regard to farmers versus non-farming income, there is variation between different locations. For instance in Kishapu, 78% of the income comes from farming. In case of in Vero, 43% of the income comes from farming, but share of all farm income increases with their own already available income as well. With respect to household food access by farming system, in case of preharvest, there is the base of raw food access was for household list producing single food crop and the worst for those with mixed crop livestock and food access was found to be directly associated with share of all farm income and all groups showed considerable deterioration of between seasons but list for the single food crop production and the greater for the mixed crop livestock group again due to the influence of farm income. Food insecurity by district and by income, as you can see from the graph, the average varies considerably between the regions. Like I said in case of Ethiopia recommendation, we need to consider the location difference. In case of like 35% of households were severely food insecure which also varies between the different locations like 50.6% in Kishapu and 19.1% in Vero and household food insecurity was found to be inversely associated with income and a relatively small drop in dietary diversity in preharvest season for all farming system were found and mixed food crop household had slightly lower dietary diversity than other group in in all farming system than dietary diversity for mixed crop livestock and cash crop household is significantly associated with the farming season. So like similar to that of Ethiopia and with regard to consumption of food group we found dietary diversity was mainly defined with respect to those indicators in terms of vegetable consumption oil or fat or spices and beverage and we found low consumption of egg in the meeting in both season. Like in case of Ethiopia we found they tend to sell instead of consuming the meat and egg or milk. Increasing consumption of legume fruits and fish at post harvest and decreasing consumption of milk products and rws and tuber at post harvest and we also found seasonal change in consumption was higher for mixed crop livestock households. Coming to conclusion and recommendation for Tanzania household food security is relatively high but vary by farming systems by income especially by district similar with that of Ethiopia and dietary diversity is generally low and little difference between farming system or between seasons then composition of food group shows considerable variation between between seasons. Households have high dependence on the market but few means to deal with the challenges in the market was found and they are highly vulnerable to market fluctuation. Then the corresponding recommendations are indicated there increase in agriculture production and farm income improve all farm income opportunities example for instance income be employment in different all farm activities available in the local context improve access to market for small-scale producers and maybe road and credit service could help and target welfare and the development of program towards the worst affected district would help in overcoming the challenges. Promote public dietary awareness like we said in case of Ethiopia knowledge on nutrition actually matters. I think that's all I have. Thank you. We did a a sub-sample of the households that the mother has presented on the nutrition status of mothers and their children. This is just background information about the two countries it is Ethiopia and it is a distance near and you can see the levels of under nutrition low birth weight, under weight, stunting and wasting these are very high in these countries. So we wanted to see what what is really going on so we collected quantitative as well as qualitative data on that nutrition status and other variables that affect nutrition status and then the assessment of nutritional status of women and children and the main objective was to examine micronutrient and nutritional status among mothers and children in different agroecological zones as well as seasons. So basically this is the method the methodality has already been presented but I wanted you to look at the the seasons. In Ethiopia pre-havest season is July-August and post-havest is January-February. In Tanzania post-havest is pre-havest is February-March and post-havest is July-August so see the the differences here. So we had in Ethiopia 216 pairs and in Tanzania 220 pairs and these were divided equally in the two ecological zones and in Ethiopia we had like low land this is Oromia and up midland was Tigray and in Tanzania we had extreme arid area like Shinyanga and the semi arid Vomero and these were the parameters that we collected data on and we did the anthropometry as well as biochemical measurements for hemoglobin ions in urinary iodine and the other things that they are not showing on the slide there and then we did the questionnaires of course there's the usual way of collecting data so these are some of the results that came out and you could see parallel very well with the socio-demographic data or socio-economic data that has been presented by Jamal here so you can see maternal nutritional status season has a significant influence here you could see that during the pre-havest this is the period just before harvest levels of anemia are higher almost 41% in Ethiopia and 89% in Tanzania low birth weight again low BMI for women higher during the pre-havest and lower post harvest also consumption of foods more than four five food groups this is the women data diversity score was higher during the pre-havest than during the post this is a bit strange because we had expected that probably during the pre-havest there'll be less diversity than during the post harvest again for children stunting is higher during pre and slightly lower during post harvest and for all other indicators underweight the same the only strange thing is about worst in which seems to increase during post than during pre-havest anemia also for children decreased slightly during post harvest especially in Tanzania then micronutrient deficiencies in Ethiopia they managed to do quite a number of measurements and here iodine deficiency was as presented higher in children than in the mothers anemia was higher in children than in women and deficiency anemia was also higher in children than in their mothers zinc deficiency apparently was higher in women than in their mothers but we also still have higher incidences of greater in Ethiopia in in 2014 in 2015 this is quite discouraging really with all the iodization programs that have been going on and then obviously you can see that 63 percent of the mothers consumed salt that was not iodized and that was reflected in their urinary iodine concentration which was about 43 percent of the women had low urinary iodine content which is a marker of iodine deficiency but we also observed that these deficiencies don't occur alone like core existence of iron zinc and iodine deficiency in one person or one individual and this is very very serious and we often go for one indicator like anemia and forget about other micronutrients so here you can see 20 almost 24 percent of the children had bought all three micronutrient deficiencies and 20 percent of the mothers but we had those who had at least two or one deficiency so this is and those who did not have any deficiency this is just about 12 percent among children and only 25 percent among among their mothers so this is a really serious situation that is not just anemia or iron deficiency but all other micronutrient deficiencies from what we have heard about the dietary consumption pattern that only monotonous diets are consumed based on cereals and these cereals are processed so most likely the micronutrients are lost in the process we also looked at the effect of study sites and you can see like in Oromia anemia was highest especially during post harvest was during post harvest anemia was lower compared to pre harvest again in one area but Tigray was doing a little bit better so I think the depends on the situation in these areas and the types of foods that they consume because it's not true that all people in all these social regions will be consuming the same kind of diet and deficiency was also very high so all indicators are leading to telling us that things are not good in these areas and then we had the situation in Tanzania again pre post harvest giving us the same kind of resource that the situation is a little bit better during post harvest than pre harvest but I want you to focus on the stunting levels this clearly shows that these children did not grow during this period because we had 60 percent pre harvest and 69 percent post harvest meaning that those who were stunted did not grow but again we had those who were a little bit better who did not grow so we had a higher prevalence at post harvest so this is and this is an indicator that is used in many of the development even in the nutrition report or in some interventions the focus on stunting but stunting is not changing very quickly and sometimes it's not probably a good indicator we could go for wasting I think that is a bit better that in pre harvest you have high prevalence but immediately during post harvest the prevalence of wasting disappears so this is something that we need to take out of this study that we probably address different indicators in different areas also on farming systems as Jamai presented you could see that mixed crop farming and mixed crop and livestock in these farming systems the situation is not good and one would have expected to see better situation in these areas because of diversity in production so we assume that there will be diversity in consumption but this is not happening and that's why we need to really go back and do deeper analysis to see what is causing this situation why things are not happening the way they expect them to happen this was also observed among mothers so again in these systems mothers and children are equally affected in terms of nutrition status in terms of diversity again here we are seeing that really diversity is not that high you could see that more than 60 percent are on low dietary diversity consuming one to three different groups of foods which is it's not and that's why we have high under nutrition and micro nutrient deficiencies this was also observed in Ethiopia so to conclude we would say that the rural households are exposed to continuous seasonal variations in food availability and nutritional status and we don't know how that affects their overall health in terms even of productivity and reproduction this is called existence of under nutrition and macro nutrient deficiencies among mothers and children there's low to very low dietary diversity so low consumption of animal source foods vegetables and fruits and this could be related to I don't know people are not aware of the importance of fruits and vegetables or is it that poverty drives them to sell these products so that they can get income so diversity in production at least in this observation does not lead to diversity in consumption so we have high prevalence of under nutrition in mixed crop and mixed crop and livestock farming systems so I was just wondering why why is that happening and then we have limited knowledge on food and nutrition among household members and this could be contributing to what we are seeing and nutrition problems are not the same in all areas at all times so they vary with the season ecological zones and farming systems some of these issues are never captured at national and global level but you need to take note of that so we need there's a need for context and time-specific nutrition interventions more needs to be done to identify such scenarios and what needs to be done and that can be done together with the people who are affected otherwise you cannot sit here and say okay we can be clever enough to identify these problems so we need to enhance knowledge and understanding about food and nutrition to influence consumption as agriculture production, agriculture planning and production and thank you very much. I suppose the overall finding was that until recently um and this is obviously we're looking at the issue of agriculture nutrition one of these key sort of nutrition sensitive sectors I suppose the the basic thing was that in both countries until recently agricultural policy paid very little attention to nutrition that's the bottom line and the focus in both countries was and to quite a large extent still is about increasing production and particularly cereal production and that's really what we found and what you actually find is that to quite a large extent that's still the case despite the fact that the policies have improved certainly they've improved in terms of their design and they've improved in terms of the degree of multi-sectoral sort of co-ordination and so on especially at the policy development and formulation level and I think a lot of that's because of the sun movement and and and so on but when it comes to the district level you don't necessarily see that degree of multi-sectoral co-ordination so with with that those brief remarks I can sort of whiz quickly through these slides because that's basically similar to what they say and so Ethiopia you know you have seen an impressive growth of cereal production obviously we know about food crisis there this year so we know it's vulnerable but doubly of real agricultural GDP in the last few years and most of that driven by increased cereal production but as I said most of the agricultural policies in Ethiopia and even the kind of overarching policies the growth and transformation programme were primarily based on on their conception of food security which is all about increase in cereal production and very little attention to nutrition so there are the food security programmes the productive safe net programme and others in Ethiopia which are again you know addressing vulnerable households that's good again they they don't necessarily have a more sort of specific nutritional components but they are there and they're important but you know just to underline food security in both countries is largely seen in terms of increasing cereal production not about the quality of the diet or diet and diversity so you know we then looked at what what in nutrition policies in Ethiopia and they have basically come from the health sector so you know you've had agricultural during agricultural policies on one side and nutrition on the other side but primarily led by the Ministry of Health been a number of really quite interesting initiatives in health and that includes the national health extension programme that's been going for the last since 2003 with a massive increase in in community-based health extension workers which is great then you had national nutrition strategy in Ethiopia from 2008 but that was seen as very single sector basically again it was sort of going to health dominated with health-related programmes and not really multi-sectoral that was at least recognised so in 2013 there was a revised national nutrition strategy that involves a lot of sectors including the agricultural sector although it did the kind of overall responsibility for for implementation still rest of the Ministry of Health so there is as I said you know some progression there so under the revised national nutrition strategy there's a new mandate for the agricultural sector and that does talk about increasing the quality of food produced and mainstreaming nutrition into agriculture and there's a number of you know specific things like increasing consumption to various diet focus on animal source foods and fish production and so on there's a nutrition unit established within the Ministry of Agriculture to mainstream nutrition into agriculture so again that's that's positive the right moves are being made the issue is to what extent it translates into action on the ground so when it comes to implementation we've found and Jess will talk more about this that there's major implementation problems particularly at the lower level and you know when we've looked at the two sites East Nauragia and Aromia and Tigray and discussed with a lot of people development agents and other district level officers, community health works and so on and basically nutrition was still seen as mainly the responsibility of the health personnel and the agricultural people the extension agents development agents still see their main focus as being on food security and increasing serial production you know despite the fact that the policy is now sort of moved on but nonetheless that that's in their own sort of way of looking at and in their mandates that's primarily what they see themselves as being doing there's quite interesting literature about you know the difficulties across sectoral collaboration and you know we kind of explored that a bit and we found in Aromia in East Nauragia there's cross sectoral collaboration around addressing emergencies you know if there's a food crisis as there is at the moment people do get together in the you know the very efficient actually in in sort of identifying vulnerable households and getting food to them and so on but it doesn't really go beyond the dealing with emergencies Tigray seems to be a bit more advanced in that respect there is this kind of view amongst the district level staff that households are not sort of aware of nutrition issues you know they don't they don't sort of you know people are undernarched because they don't understand the importance of sort of you know WSPDACs or whatever and that may be true to some extent but also what we found is that there's major structural constraints I mean first of all over very very small land sizes but also you know that households have to sell these nutritionally valuable crops to get cash income so you know and I think there wasn't necessarily understanding at the level of the extension workers that actually this is a sort of imperative on household you know they just say oh they don't understand you know so I think that there's also kind of an educational and training aspect about for the extension workers and community health workers around that issue but on the other hand the property is lack of awareness in some respects as well and that we have a number of policy level recommendations for Ethiopia that came out for our review and they're all sort of fairly sensible I guess tend to be higher level you know recommendations but really about about mainstreaming nutrition as a sort of a key area in agriculture so I think it is starting to happen and so that's good but just to do that through a number of ways and also I suppose you know the there is a sense that if if there is greater understanding of the importance of nutrition then that will sort of increase demand you know for a more diversified diets and then maybe the agricultural production system will respond but at the same time that's not necessarily going to happen automatically so you need a lot of work on nutrition education and also then support of all of people to make sure they have access to more diversified diets and of course being academics we suggest the need for more research on these issues it turns me pretty much the same actually I don't think I'll spend too much time because it's pretty much the same I mean again they've got you know a good sort of range of strategies both at national level and sectoral and and that you know again as with Ethiopia there's increasing sort of recognition of the importance of multi-sectoral approaches to nutrition including agriculture but again there's you know sometimes agriculture is included in the plan but then there isn't a natural sort of implementation activity or it's not in detail and then there are definitely human resource capacity limitations and also limited financial resource which I think Lawrence mentioned in the G&R as well so again we've reviewed these policies and frameworks the reports are up on the website by the way so look at those institutional arrangements now again as with Ethiopia there's a sort of high-level multi-sectoral coordination group or steering steering committee on nutrition located in the prime minister's office that's good shows commitment and a technical working group to go with that but when you come down to sectoral the people in the sectors they don't necessarily have a strong understanding of the importance of nutrition in their particular sector this is the whole nutrition sensitive area again minister of finance and economic affairs established the budget code for nutrition in 2011 good but at least when this report was done they hadn't actually allocated a budget not so good some good work on food fortification with industry probably benefiting urban consumers more and then Joyce and her colleagues conducted a review of 33 policy documents and 12 strategies that should be relevant to nutrition found that 43 percent of them had no mentioned nutrition at all um so how to improve nutrition through agriculture in Tanzania um as we've said I think it's sort of one of the main messages coming from the ad work I think that there is a sense still you know to sort of go beyond just thinking about food security as being about increased serial production um that slide is a bit hard to see it but it kind of indicates if anything that the the regions in Tanzania that have higher maize self-sufficiency also tend to have higher stunting rates which which is very interesting I think so you know if district officials on Israel got to people promoting food security and their view of food security is made self-sufficiency it doesn't seem to be you know having a positive impact on stunting because it's a bit generalized but that seems to be the case um and the some of the recommendations here very much coming from Joyce's work really that the goal of agriculture should be to grow food for nutrition and that you know agriculture basically needs to look at the nutritional value of what's being produced not just increasing serial production um so I'll just skip over that but um the the policy level recommendations then um you know really nutrition needs to be if you're like mainstreamed into um a lot of the relevant sectors there's a need to improve women's skills I mean again that's another key aspect of the sort of gendered components of the nutrition area come out and so much of the work that we've been doing um the need to develop a food basket for various regions or agroecological zones um to in other words a sort of more agricultural ag agroecological specific planning in agriculture that takes nutrition into account and to develop indicators around that and then strength and capacity at all levels there's no doubt about that that there's a need to strengthen capacity um of key actors at different levels to to implement nutrition focused agricultural activities everything that I'm presenting bear in mind this is just the perceptions of the people we spoke to this isn't necessarily the the real truth but it was really good to get a sense of actually how people felt that were working in these countries um so our formatting seems to have gone a bit awry um so so we had four national level workshops we brought together people from the line ministries different government departments president and prime minister's offices un agencies research institutions donors um and the international NGOs and some of the main things that we found throughout the the um four days of discussion were the indeed national level coordination between agriculture and nutrition and other sectors really is improving so a lot of the discussions around coordinating weren't new to people you know everybody was coming with that sense that absolutely this is what is starting to happen this is what we should be doing and they saw the value in it um the two national nutrition strategies that are in place in both countries have and a real element of multi multi-sector collaboration so the nine different line ministries in Ethiopia have signed this new nutrition strategy committing to um put targets within their sectors to reduce nutrition for example um there's certainly use of evidence in policy making and all of the policy makers um that we spoke to really acknowledge the importance of using evidence when they're making decisions around policy but everybody felt that actually access to research was an issue especially context specific research um to their country or indeed to districts at the district level where I think Joyce has highlighted that there can be very real differences um and often that research findings have quite contradictory conclusions so you might have one piece of research that recommends one thing and then another piece of research that's saying something quite contradictory and there was a real sense that it was a bit of a minefield trying to navigate through the evidence to decide what this kind of best practice should be for making decisions implementation wise the the nutrition strategies everybody felt that the implementation just wasn't happening quickly enough there was a sense of frustration that although this wonderful nutrition strategy in place and it's been launched that actually enforcement of the strategies were a bit of an issue um and it wasn't happening implementation at the district level due to a number of reasons maybe capacity resources um funding um various different issues which I'll talk about in the next slide we facilitated the discussion around kind of barriers and challenges to coordination so everyone feels that it should be happening but it's not really and I'm trying to find out a little bit more about why that should be um it echoes a lot of what my colleagues have already said that nutrition is still viewed as a food security issue and a quote that actually one of our participants made was that those working with the agriculture their focus is on meals and production for income not on nutrition you know everybody's talking about improving their income and keeping their livelihoods going but they're not thinking about the nutrition it's going I guess it's kind of a longer term thought rather than the the kind of here and now um a real lack of guidance on how to work across sectors so we're all talking about what we should be doing um you know everybody knows we should be coordinating but actually in practice how does that happen what does that look like um everybody was asking whether there was examples from other countries where it was working and what were they doing and actually we were a little bit stuck at having a really good set of guidance um or case study to give them um a lack of a dedicated space where people could come together so I think the feedback that we got from all of these workshops was that everybody really appreciated being together in one space to have these discussions to talk to their peers there was a lot of different um relationships that were built between people working in agriculture with people working in nutrition that hadn't had the opportunity to meet before before we came along and brought everybody together so there was a sense that actually having a regular space that that could happen would be a real bonus and would would start to help the dialogue across sectors while people collaborate and share um and then again the main challenge um that came out of all four workshops um in both countries was the implementation and coordination at that subnational level is the greatest challenge so although it's starting to happen and it is happening at the national level it's not filtering down so with that in mind we kind of changed our tactic a little bit we intended to just host national level workshops throughout the duration of the project but after holding two years of those it seemed that actually it would be more uh more beneficial to try and hold some subnational level workshops and bring together district workers some of the grass roots the ag and the health extension so that's what we did um we had another four workshops so we had uh two districts in Ethiopia some McKellay in Tigray region and Derodawar Derodawar in Oremia and Moragoro and Moansa in Tanzania um they were chosen because that's where our partner institutions are so it was uh it wasn't a random selection um we brought together the health and the ag extension workers nutrition officers local government planning departments NGOs researchers I think we had about sort of 50 people roughly at the the McKellay workshop some people have travelled quite a long way to get there there was a real energy there was a real sense of anticipation in the room that actually this was starting to help coordination and and everybody really had a sense they wanted to do something to work towards the nutrition problem which was really well recognised um there was real value acknowledged in collaboration we asked participants to give or we invited participants to give a presentation of their work in some of the areas that they worked towards addressing nutrition through agriculture and there's an awful lot of activity being done across the board um most of the examples were around either agriculture or nutrition if I'm honest there was very few examples with the exception of some of the the international NGOs like Helen Keller who are working um in sort of community gardens and that that kind of area to work through agriculture um and in practice the government um government departments and district departments are still working in their silos so I think one example in Tanzania was that the agriculture and the health extension officers for the district had just met for the first time which you know you sort of think that should be happening on a regular basis um there was a sense that actually the NGOs are collaborating quite well they're they're communicating they're discussing a bit more so maybe there's something that can be learnt there for the the government departments there is some positives I think for example in Tanzania the district nutrition officers which were being appointed during our first workshop in 2013 by the time we hosted our final workshop every single district in Tanzania has an appointed district nutrition officer whose role in part is to work along the cross-sector collaboration for nutrition so um things were starting to change even through the life cycle of our project um looking at the barriers um and again although we worked in in two different countries surprisingly the things that came out and this is a a summary of both countries but the the challenges and the barriers were very very similar in both countries there wasn't a distinct difference between the two at all one of the main things is is planning so the agricultural workers were saying that they plan for the year ahead they talk about doing the budget they plan for what they're going to grow but there's no nutrition presence at those meetings at all so nobody sits and says well hang on a minute how about growing something other than maize for a change um that's just not brought to the table it's not that they're not invited apparently it's an open planning session and any stakeholder can uh can join but actually the district nutrition officers for example just weren't even aware that these meetings were happening so it's just a real lack of communication going on and things that probably could be quite easily tweaked to start making improvements um we talked a little bit about policies and where the policies were providing sort of barriers or opportunities for nutrition and the general consensus and i think this quote highlights it again is that um national policies are moving this way with large-scale commercial farming, sizell and sugar for example and staple cereals but little on ensuring a diverse diet so a lot of it's talking about kind of scaling up production um very sort of single crop style rather than looking at a diverse production um a real lack of communication and guidance so although nutrition officers are in place which is a real tick in the box for Tanzania and especially when you're looking at it as an outsider at a national level you think well that's a really amazing achievement and then we start speaking to the district nutrition officers and they're telling us that they had no roles and responsibilities they arrived on their first day of their job and everybody thought they were the cook so kind of a little bit of a mismatch in what they'd been told they were being expected to do and what their their colleagues were expecting them to be doing so it took a little while and actually a lot of work has happened since we conducted our workshops to do sensitisation meetings internal advocacy for these posts and things are starting to change but it's just an example of how things might look great on paper and actually in practice the situation is quite different and then capacity so capacity both financial resources and human capacity are real issues and Lawrence you mentioned about having national budgets being allocated to nutrition and actually that being quite an issue we had some people some of our district officers in Tanzania say that they would put in for the budget to be allocated and because apparently there was no budget code they weren't allowed to have the money so actually even when you've got the budget in place at the national level the disbursement just isn't happening and programs aren't getting off the ground so a lot of frustration around the various different barriers that on the face of it seem like they could be tweaked quite easily to make big changes quite quickly there's just a picture quickly you might recognise one of the participants we asked our participants in one of the workshops to give an example of how well coordinated they thought their organisation was internally because we talked a lot about coordinating between organisations but actually is there something you could be doing just within your own organisation and we asked everybody on a scale of one to five to just stand where they thought that would be represented so one being absolutely no coordination whatsoever and five being pretty perfect and you can see there's quite a range between between what people felt what I found was interesting was that actually the four and fives on the most for the most part tended to be the non-governmental organisations the CSOs the donors whereas it was the government workers that felt that actually the coordination was just just the pits so it was just quite a nice visual to show you but some recommended actions and these were actions that came from the participants themselves so we said to them no what do you think can be done what would you like to see happen they talked about having the decision makers actually attend these these discussions in these workshops we found that often we'd invite the decision maker and they would delegate somebody lower to come and attend which happens a lot but actually then there was no feeding back to the relevant decision maker once they finished the workshops so actually nothing would really happen post workshops so thinking about how you get the right people in the room to have those discussions maybe doing an inventory of programs and implementers to think about better coordination and avoiding duplication I think that goes with what you're saying about the humanitarian response you know there's much better coordination now in the humanitarian response than in the kind of development world if you like so maybe having some kind of inventory to see who's doing what and actually a mapping to see how you can collaborate rather than duplicate again clear guidelines are needed on how to collaborate and I think there's a number of projects that are in the infancy that are starting to look at action research on how to do this in different countries that hopefully some learnings can be extrapolated from that might be relevant to other countries having common indicators and targets across sectors that again is starting to happen with the new national nutrition strategies which is a real bonus training on staff on nutrition issues so why is nutrition important if you work in agriculture why does it really affect you and what you do just to try and help people start thinking in terms of actually there's nutrition outcomes and then again creating that space that brings people together although it's something quite simple to do it just seems that it doesn't happen and it's something that's very simple that I think could be done but on the whole the participants at the district level were so energized mainly frustrated but very excited about the possibility of improving things and improving coordination so it was really encouraging to see that actually changes starting to happen but there are obviously things that could be done to help it improve quicker some very quick final messages coming reflecting on the agri diet project as a whole was it worth the taxpayer's money have we learned something have we achieved something where do we go from here very quickly I would like to say that we have we feel the project has contributed a lot of evidence on the sometimes complex pathways between agricultural production and nutritional outcome in specific local contexts in four locations or sorry two locations in Ethiopia and two locations in in Tanzania and as we say within the team it's complicated there are either no direct pathway between you know a particular model of agriculture and particularly nutritional outcome but there's a lot going on and we need to unpack it at the local level key issues that are emerging at the household community level as you've heard from my colleagues is low dietary diversity ongoing vulnerability food gaps and so forth widespread micronutrient deficiencies among mothers and infants that's a key finding of the of the project our focus on seasonality because critical defining feature of the project really highlights variations across time within the year as you heard and periods of extreme vulnerability within the year multi annual or panel studies are what are now needed we do this two seasons in one year we need to do this cross multiple years to see what the long-term pattern looks like we've identified mixed impacts of cash cropping and market access better access to the market does not lead to better outcomes a switch from subsistence to cash cropping does not automatically guarantee better nutritional out comes in the household it may be the development pathway that we have followed in the rest of the world and the countries use over time to go from low income to high income but it works in multiple ways indirect ways in ways we don't fully understand when we look at the household level in specific contexts and the project demonstrates the importance of multi disciplinary teams looking at the same households from different perspectives it sounds basic but you know having two people going together a nutritionist and a nigger and a agriculturalist a socioclinic and a scientist and social scientist looking at the same households on the same people at the same time measuring them gathering information in different ways and sitting together it's something we give a lot of sort of lip service to us suppose multi disciplinarity but um i like i think it's nice to see it in practice and it's been a great experience quickly number two at the national level ivory diet has demonstrated the critical need for rigorous examination of policies from top to bottom across multiple stakeholders especially for the integration of agricultural and nutrition or nutrition typically housed within health health policies we've been hearing that uh from jessie we've been hearing it from nick and from all the colleagues that it's not always what it says on the on the cover of the report it's not always what the national document policy document says you need to follow that down to the local level to see what are the obstacles and to identify room for room for improvements it highlights the need for greater coordination of policies especially at sub national levels the pressing need to balance the emphasis on production we've seen lots lots of emphasis is any lots of emphasis on production with an emphasis on consumption issues that is understanding dietary diversity the availability of nutrient rich foods even when people are producing them they're not necessarily consuming them and these will include fruit vegetables and possibly above all animal source foods when we brought out one of our nutritionists from uc he's never been in africa and he's spent a little while there and he looked at the the figure couldn't quite believe the figures you've seen from the blood tests and what he saw around them and he says people just need to start eating these animals this is the answer here's the problem here's the answer but as i say it's uh it's complicated and finally we are recommending greater targeting of policies and programs and awareness among policies of seasonal differences and the time critical the time critical nature of the delivery of support programs the differences between households and even areas of high poverty and they differ by hunger levels by income by gender of head of household and by farming systems it's very difficult to generalize even at the local district level around the you know what's happening in a particular community we need to look at these differentials there's an ongoing need for safety nets and livelihood support given the context of of very vulnerable agriculture and relatively low low productivity we need to explore ways to retain high value foods such as milk eggs and animal other animal products within producing households and and districts that's sort of the big the big picture the big message i'm going to leave it there thanks very much