Attachments
Executive summary
Social protection provides a policy response to poverty, risk, vulnerabilities and social exclusion, including those related to food insecurity and malnutrition. However, social protection policies and programming often focus too narrowly on income poverty, overlooking other crucial components of vulnerability as well as biological poverty, which encompasses the basic nutritional needs for a healthy and productive life. Such a narrow framing results in social protection benefits being benchmarked against calorie requirements from commonly consumed foods only, rather than nutritious or healthy diets. This is despite the evidence that even when caloric needs are met in terms of quantity, the quality of a diet is not guaranteed, so age- and gender-specific nutritional risks to health and cognitive development remain unaddressed.
The World Food Programme’s Fill the Nutrient Gap (FNG) is a methodology that estimates the cost and affordability of nutritious diets, and combines this with secondary data on local food systems and environments, to comprehensively understand the barriers to accessing and consuming nutritious diets in specific contexts. By adopting a systems approach, FNG analysis generates evidence to inform the design and implementation of food security and nutrition-sensitive (FSN-sensitive) social protection.
Specifically, it identifies and models the potential impacts of social assistance programmes on closing affordability gaps – defined as the gap between food expenditure and the lowest cost of meeting nutrient needs – to assist stakeholders across sectors in identifying entry points to enhance the food security and nutrition-sensitivity of social protection programmes. An FNG analysis also provides context-specific evidence to inform transfer values and packages at the sub-national level for policymakers and practitioners.
FNG analyses have been conducted in over 50 countries since 2016. This report and compendium of 12 FNG case studies underscores the importance of integrating FSN-sensitive design into national social protection systems to effectively address the nutrition and other essential needs of the most vulnerable populations. This will ultimately promote better human capital and economic development and strengthen their resilience against risks and shocks. Interventions need to be context-specific and consider social, economic and physical barriers and intersecting inequalities in access to healthy, nutritious diets. The affordability gap, as demonstrated in the twelve country case studies, is a useful indicator to assess the potential of FSN-sensitive social protection to catalyse policy and programmatic change.
Across all case studies and modelled interventions, this indicator was used to define which FSN-sensitive components could help social protection programmes improve access to healthy and nutritious diets for those most at risk of poverty and nutritional vulnerability. By identifying a set of tailored interventions, it can inform policy and programme design to address the needs of the populations targeted by existing social protection systems.
Integrating analytical tools such as the FNG into social protection planning and implementation can lead to more targeted and impactful interventions that not only alleviate hunger but address the drivers of food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition, thus contributing to the achievement of sustainable development goals related to zero hunger, poverty reduction, health improvement, gender equality, and reduced inequalities.
Access the case studies here.