Nutrition for Development (N4D)

Purpose

National Information Platforms for Nutrition (NIPN) is an initiative of the European Commission to provide support to countries to strengthen their information systems for nutrition and to improve the analysis of data so as to better inform the strategic decisions they are faced with to prevent malnutrition and its consequences.

Governments and development agencies are faced with the challenge of prioritizing and scaling up the most effective interventions – nutrition-specific as well as nutrition-sensitive – to help achieve the ambitious international development goal of improved nutrition for everyone.

NIPNs support countries in the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement to strengthen their capacities to bring together existing multisectoral information on nutritional outcomes with information on factors that influence them, including policies, programmes and investments, in order to track progress towards international and national targets; to analyse data to understand better how malnutrition can be prevented; and to inform national policies and improve programmes.

Approach

A National Information Platform for Nutrition (NIPN) is rooted within existing institutions and national multisectoral coordination systems for nutrition. From the analysis of available and shared data, it generates evidence that is used by (sub-)national stakeholders for developing policy, designing programmes and allocating investments, through the NIPN operational cycle consisting of three elements that constantly revolve and feed into each other:

• question formulation based on government priorities;
• analysis of data to inform the questions;
• communication of the findings back to government.

The NIPN operational cycle is supported by the national NIPN structure made up of:

• actors within a policy component which convenes and facilitates a multisectoral advisory committee, playing a key role in policy question formulation, interpretation of the results of data analysis and communication of findings;
• actors within a data component that collates multisectoral data in a central repository and analyses the data.

Both components are hosted by national organisations. The NIPN country team, comprising staff from the national host organisations, staff on contract and technical advisors, is embedded within these two components and is responsible for implementing the NIPN approach.

The NIPN initiative is the combined efforts of country implemented platforms under the oversight of NIPN Global Support. NIPN C4N Global Support oversees the nine country platforms, and internationally brings coherence to the process to achieve alignment with other global initiatives. 

The NIPN initiative is also supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 

Implementing organisations

Depending on the country, the NIPNs are implemented by national bureaux of statistics, national bodies and institutions in charge of multisectoral nutrition, national public health institutions, European Union delegations, IFPRI, UNICEF, Sofreco and GIZ.  

Region

Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lao PDR, Niger, Uganda and Zambia.