By 2010, the collaboration between the World Food Programme (WFP) and IFPRI broadened beyond food security—defined by the United Nations as access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food for a healthy life—to encompass nutrition security—defined as having sufficient quantity and quality of food to meet dietary needs and food preferences. This wider scope was driven by the understanding that physically and mentally healthy people are more resilient to shocks and are more productive—essential ingredients to overcoming poverty. The body of evidence on using transfers to improve nutrition, produced by IFPRI in collaboration with WFP, helped identify transfers as instruments for improving child nutrition and potentially breaking the cycle of poverty.
In 2012, IFPRI, WFP, and Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, with support from the IFPRI-led CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), examined the country’s nutrition situation and food subsidy program. Egypt had suffered a succession of crises that led to worsening poverty and food insecurity: 13.7 million people were living in poverty by 2011, with more and more children becoming undernourished. And in the face of increasing poverty, the Egyptian government’s food subsidy program led households to consume cheap and calorie-dense foods, contributing to the double burden of malnutrition: obesity and stunting. The joint report on the food subsidy program, Tackling Egypt’s Rising Food Insecurity in a Time of Transition, identified specific program reforms to better address malnutrition and poverty.
In 2013, policy makers and stakeholders convened a workshop to discuss the findings and develop an action plan. A year later, the Egyptian government enacted significant reforms to the food subsidy program—the evaluation had catalyzed an evidence-based policy-making process to reduce obesity and stunting in Egypt. At the same time, IFPRI’s Bangladesh Policy Research and Strategy Support Program and WFP launched the Transfer Modality Research Initiative (TMRI)—a pilot program with an experimental design that looked at the impacts of five types of social protection transfers on income, food security, and child nutrition in Bangladesh. To evaluate different transfer approaches, 4,000 ultra-poor women and their 21,600 family members received substantial benefits from 2012 to 2014 in the form of cash, food, a combination of cash and food, or a combination of either cash or food with nutrition education.
IFPRI’s assessment, supported by PIM, showed that giving cash to the poor was not enough to change behavior. Nutrition education was also needed to improve children’s nutrition. In fact, WFP and IFPRI designed an initiative that successfully reduced child stunting in Bangladesh by 7.3 percent—three times the national average. To scale up this pilot program, the government of Bangladesh formed an inter-ministerial Technical Committee with representatives from nine ministries, IFPRI, and WFP. Findings from the TMRI will support the Bangladeshi government in streamlining the national safety-net system and strengthening a national social protection strategy, moving it closer to its goal of eliminating malnutrition and poverty.
For more information on IFPRI's work in partnership with WFP, please go to this brochure.
