Sikandra Kurdi and José Luis Figueroa – IFPRI Egypt
There is widespread agreement that malnutrition is a problem in Egypt, however, a comprehensive strategy that enables effective coordination across stakeholders is still lacking. During the IFPRI Egypt Seminar “High quality evidence is critical for high quality nutrition policy”, experts in nutrition from organizations including IFPRI, UNICEF and CAPMAS discussed the need for greater coordination in terms of data generation, access, and policy advocacy.
Dr. Stuart Gillepsie, senior research fellow at IFPRI, provided a global perspective showing global statistics on malnutrition as well as the conceptual framework on how the different dimensions of care, food, and health interact to create nutrition outcomes. Gillepsi discussed how there was a great mobilization of resources within the past decade towards nutrition and awareness of nutrition as a key component of human well-being. He also pointed out that it is key for policy makers to build political commitment, and to provide the research community with the needed data to frame the problem; while researchers ought to find narratives of success in tackling malnutrition to inspire policy makers.
Dr. Habiba Hassan-Wassef, health and nutrition policy consultant, opened the seminar with a history of nutrition policy in Egypt. Her presentation started with a timeline showing major reports and meetings related to nutrition policy going back to the 1940s. She argued that Egypt had a long and strong history of giving considerable attention to nutrition. Nevertheless, recent history is full of documents and reports with limited actions on the ground. Dr. Hassan-Wassef emphasized that, currently, “there is no coherent governance for nutrition in Egypt”, pointing out that structures such as national nutrition committees and the Food and Nutrition Security Information Center are inactive and unable to play a coordinating role.
Dr. Moataz Saleh, child survival-nutrition specialist, highlighted UNICEF's role in terms of promoting a fair chance “for every child” in Egypt. UNICEF is committed to high quality data. Its activities in Egypt include supporting the Ministry of Health in preparing manuals on best practices for anthropometric measurement, nutritional counseling, and feeding guidelines. In addition, UNICEF assists with supply chain management for health centers across Egyptian governorates, and supports the Ministry of Social Solidarity in implementing the Takaful and Karama conditionalities related to antenatal visits and child growth monitoring.
Dr. Nehall Farouk, from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), highlighted the role of CAPMAS in generating data. In the first part of her presentation she described the HIECS survey and the methodology used for data collection for the 2015 HIECS. In the second part, she discussed key indicators related to nutrition that can be generated using the HIECS data. Dr. Farouk showed that the share of population that had calorie intake deficit stands at 16.3 percent and pointed out that rural areas have higher stunting rates than urban areas.
Dr. Sikandra Kurdi, associate research fellow at IFPRI, presented a working paper co-authored with Jose Luis Figueroa on the influence of measurement error on stunting rates. While the Egyptian DHS is the main source of information on stunting rates, it has indications of high measurement error. Dr. Kurdi explained that measurement error will always bias stunting rates upwards. The methodology applied in the presented paper depends on a simulation method to show how much the stunting rates calculated using the DHS may be biased by measurement error. The authors concluded that the stunting rate in 2014 may be overestimated by 5 to 8 percentage points and emphasized that the nutrition community should be aware of this when looking at past rounds of the DHS, while also working to reduce measurement error in the future.
Following an interactive discussion, the speakers agreed on the need for a nutrition council to coordinate between Ministry of Health and Ministry of Agriculture, establish accountability, and communicate with policy makers. In particular, communication with policy makers should take the form of policy briefs including economic cost-benefit analysis to explain exactly which interventions are preferable. In his concluding remarks on the seminar, Clemens Breisinger – country program leader of IFPRI Egypt – emphasized the importance of standardizing data collection practices and making existing data from different institutions accessible to researchers.
