Food systems transformation requires multiple food systems actors - across levels of government, sectors, and communities - are heard and participate as change agents. This enables the necessary conditions in which livelihoods and access to a diversity of safe and nutritious foods for all can be advanced.

In an increasingly urban world, cities with their mandates and governance tools are active sites of food systems transformation. City government administrations and the multiple actors that routinely engage with food systems have the capacity to pull and push change, influence national and global agenda, and implement context specific food system and nutrition policies and pathways alongside localised sustainable development goals.

CASCADE leverages CARE’s and GAIN's experience and expertise in systems strengthening and food systems transformation to achieve its main objectives:

1. Increase access to and consumption of healthy diets among household members in six project countries, particularly women of reproductive age and children,
2. Increase  resilience  to  economic-  and  climate change-related shocks and stresses of household members in the six project countries, particularly women of reproductive age and children.

The five-year,  60 million EUR award from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs is implemented between 2022-2026. CASCADE engages in collaborative efforts with government bodies, private service providers, and communities around five domains

• Domain 1 – Strengthened Policy Implementation
• Domain 2 – Supportive Private Service
• Domain 3 – Strengthened Community Structures
• Domain 4 – Women's Empowerment / Gender Transformation
• Domain 5 – Strengthened Coordination among Food System Actors and Processes

The Food Systems Countdown Initiative (“the Countdown”) aims to enable this understanding by monitoring the state of food systems transformation through relevant data.  The Countdown is an interdisciplinary collaboration of scientists that emerged from the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit. It seeks to provide food system actors and stakeholders (e.g., civil society, governments, and international organisations) with actionable evidence to make decisions that can bring about food system transformation.
Over a two-year process, the Countdown collaborators developed a framework to monitor food systems across five themes: (1) diets, nutrition, and health; (2) environment, natural resources, and production; (3) livelihoods, poverty, and equity; (4) governance; and (5) resilience. The Countdown then used a rigorous, multistakeholder process to arrive at indicators to monitor change across these five themes. The first annual Countdown paper and report, showcasing these indicators, were released in December 2023. They depict the current state of national food systems, providing a baseline that can be used to guide priorities for investment, research, and policymaking and assess future progress.

View the 2023 Countdown Publications

Visit the Countdown Site

Going forward, the Countdown will provide annual analysis to inform priorities and actions in the policy sphere, for the private sector, and for the development community. In this way, it supports the transformation of food systems, so they become equitable, sustainable, and resilient and positively contribute to achieving the 2030 SDGs and other global goals.

The Country Dashboards

challenges, and decide on actions at the national level, having subnational data is key for decision making and food systems transformation. To meet this need, the FSD is working closely with partners to create Country Dashboards, which enable viewing data across subnational regions within a country—like states or districts—and provide similar visualisations and diagnostics as the Global FSD. The first Country Dashboards are being created in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, and Pakistan, covering almost one billion people.

The project has developed a reliable and feasible method for data collection, along with a suite of diet quality indicators that encompass both nutrient adequacy and the prevention of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). As of 2024, it has adapted and translated its 5-minute questionnaire, the Diet Quality Questionnaire (DQQ), for use in over 120 countries and has collected nationally representative data in 85 countries across all continents, representing 85% of the global population. The Global Diet Quality Project is a partnership between Gallup, Harvard University, and GAIN.

Motivation and Aims

This project aims to collect dietary quality data in the general adult population across countries worldwide, and to provide the tools for valid and feasible diet quality monitoring within countries. The project enables the collection of consistent, comparable dietary data across countries for the first time.

All data are collected in the Gallup World Poll. The DQQ was administered in national probability-based samples of civilian, non-institutionalized individuals of any gender, aged 15 and older. Data collection occurred either using face-to-face or telephone surveys. Country-specific details of data collection can be found here. The Gallup World Poll is the only survey in the world that covers more than 98% of the world's adult population through annual, nationally representative surveys with comparable metrics across countries.

Visit Global Diet Quality Project website

About the programme:

In 2022, GAIN began to implement a new generation of large projects targeting the entire value chain for selected nutrient-dense foods.

I-CAN was launched in 2022 during COP27 by the Presidency of Egypt, and is co-chaired by Egypt and GAIN, with core partners including WHO, FAO and the SUN movement. I-CAN gained significant attention in 2023, being featured at various high-level international events and mentioned by the Director-Generals of both WHO and FAO during COP28 in Dubai. In 2024, I-CAN will focus on providing national-level support to country governments.

Five Pillars of Action to Unlock the Potential of I-CAN in 2024:

1. Strengthening National Policies and Plans: I-CAN will focus on delivering targeted and tailored support at the country level, complementing national policies, plans and strategies. Examples of this include working with governments to integrate more nutrition considerations into Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) or integrating more climate considerations into national nutrition plans.
2. Building a Strong Alliance: I-CAN aims to advance joint actions across countries and regions, connecting countries who are leaders in this space. We will support in building and executing multi-year engagement strategies with the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) process.
3. Improving Data on Integrated Action: As shown from the I-CAN 2023 baseline report, data and evidence on integrated climate and nutrition action is currently lacking. I-CAN will help drive research and monitoring efforts in this area, tracking progress to 2030 and beyond.
4. Mobilising Finance and the Private Sector: Financing is lagging behind policy, with private sector integration being one of the lowest performing areas in the space. I-CAN will work to unlock joint financing for climate and nutrition from Development Finance Institutions and private sector actors.
5. Becoming the ‘Go-To’ Place for Amplifying Efforts: I-CAN's ambition is to become the top platform for promoting, connecting, and advancing all efforts to improve climate and nutrition action.

Other Resources

• FAO’s I-CAN technical report: “Climate Action and Nutrition: Pathways to Impact”, text: “This report led by I-CAN partner, FAO, outlines the evidence and opportunities to integrate climate and nutrition action across four core systems: agri-food, water, health, and social protection.”
• I-CAN is formally hosted as a Climate and Nutrition Working Group under the Alliance for Transformative Action on Climate and Health (ATACH), which was launched in COP26 and is hosted by the Government of UK. The ATACH community has over 80 member states and 5 working groups, with resources available online. Click here to view I-CAN on the ATACH member page.

About the programme

In 2022, GAIN began to implement a new generation of large projects targeting the entire value chain for selected nutrient-dense foods.

A number of foods are particularly rich in the nutrients that are commonly lacking in resource-poor populations such as iron, zinc, folate, vitamin A, calcium, and vitamin B12. Priority foods for improving dietary quality have been identified by GAIN researchers Ty Beal and Flaminia Ortenzi. When examples of these priority foods are also accessibly priced and can be produced in an environmentally sustainable manner, they become prime candidates for efforts to increase access and consumption by vulnerable groups.

Numerous barriers have been identified that prevent consumers from accessing these foods; they occur at all stages of the supply chain from production inputs right through to household behaviours. GAIN’s approach to analysing supply chain blockages is described here. More recently, we have used systems dynamics modelling to understand the potential of different intervention strategies. We also always use qualitative research methods to understand consumer motivation and behaviour.

Since 2019, GAIN has been supporting the scaling up of nutrient-enriched crops, also known as biofortified crops, in Africa and Asia to improve the intakes of micronutrients or nutrients necessary for healthy growth and development. These micronutrient rich crops are developed through conventional breeding techniques (they are not genetically modified) to increase their density of iron, zinc, or vitamin A – all critical micronutrients for maintaining good health. They are also bred with other traits for improved productivity and resilience as demanded by farming communities such as high yield, drought tolerance, and resistance to disease and pests. GAIN currently supports the scaling up of a variety of nutrient enriched crops including iron enriched beans, zinc enriched rice and wheat and vitamin A enriched maize, cassava and sweet potatoes.

Our programme objectives are to

1. Motivate healthy choices by addressing consumers’ emotional tensions.
2. Provide practical support that makes it easier to practice healthy diets everyday, including promotion at point-of-sale and labelling.
3. Build a supportive food culture that favours healthy and sustainable diets through the Food Culture Alliance, a multi-stakeholder initiative co-established by GAIN, EAT and the Global Business School Network that seeks to shift food preferences and increase society’s demand for nutritious and sustainable foods.

We will achieve our programme objectives by

1. Using the Emotivate™ approach to solve the emotional tensions parents face for feeding nutritious meals.
2. Designing point-of-sale promotion that improves purchase frequency of nutritious foods among low-income consumers. Use consumer-friendly labelling systems that nudge towards better choices.
3. Deploying an action framework and operating model to deploy society-wide food culture interventions through the Food Culture Alliance.

To learn how we deploy Emotivate to motivate consumers and provide practical support at point-of-sale for vegetable purchases, see projects in Kenya, Benin and Uganda. 

On the horizon is a new project to determine how we can create demand among rural households who are both producers and consumers of food.