The Second NIPN Advisory Committee Meeting Identified key Priorities For 2020
The Advisory Committee of the National Information Platform for Nutrition (NIPN AC) was established in May 2019 to deliver high level advice to the NIPN.
The committee came together for the second time on January 28, 2020, to discuss the 2019 achievements of NIPN, identify the key priorities for 2020, comment and validate the 2019 NIPN priority policy questions which are expected to be responded by NIPN, and discuss the NIPN regional dashboard.
The chairman of the advisory committee, Dr. Ferew Lemma recalled the important role of the NIPN AC, which is, ensuring each step in the NIPN cycle is linked with the needs of the highest level of nutrition decision making in relation to demand and uptake of evidence. In order to achieve this goal, the NIPN AC provides EPHI with high level advice, validates the NIPN policy questions and supports the uptake of NIPN evidence by decision makers.
Ato Masresha Tessema, Director of the Food Science and Nutrition Research Directorate (FSNRD) and the secretary of the AC recalled the agreed actions that were put in the previous AC meeting were all done.
The deputy Director of the FSNRD and the coordinator of the NIPN, Dr.Aregash Samuel on her part explained the overview of the key activities that NIPN performed in 2019. She also highlighted the main objectives, the governance and strategic alliance of NIPN with various stakeholders.
Among the 2019 activities, Aregash mentioned the policy question formulation processes, the different capacity development trainings given to different partners, the data mapping exercise undergoing now, the communication strategy development, the website development and testing activities and the five seminars held during 2019.
Dr. Aregash briefly mentioned the 2020 priority areas and the expected support from the AC. On the NIPN data repository discussion, it was mentioned that the data repository will be both knowledge and data repository which will host nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive data.
The NIPN team members requested support form AC to get access to data to alleviate the challenges of identifying existing data.
Since data mapping for nutrition is an important activity for NIPN, it was concluded that getting data from all sectors is significant.
Dr.Meron Girma updated the status of the policy relevant question processes and presented the 12 policy relevant questions that were done in 2019.
Since the AC is expected to validate the questions, an immediate response was requested from the AC members. The AC members said the policy questions summarized by the NIPN team are relevant and the AC members will deliver their validation with in few weeks.
Mr. Zerihun Bekele on his part presented the NIPN dashboard, and explained that the dashboard was developed based on global guidance. It aims to
promote discussions
about nutrition situation and interventions that address nutritional problems across regions.
The NIPN AC members suggested that a review need to be done on additional survey data, such as the ONE-WASH national program, the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) or agriculture production surveys.
It is concluded that the dashboard visualizes important key indicators but team should work to prepare regional dashboards, which need to be presented to the relevant regional level technical committees.
During the discussion, members and representatives of the AC expressed their great interest to link nutrition related initiatives with the NIPN objective and showed willingness to cooperate.
The AC chairman, Dr. Ferew Lemma said large investments are often done to implement nutrition programs and NIPN should be more involved in in such interventions.
Considering NIPN as a useful initiative which can help decision makers, NIPN should not be limited to influence only the policy makers, rather broaden its scope and should work to influence decision makers through strategies, programs and guidelines.
He added, the AC will deliver its inputs and will validate the policy questions, and that the regional dashboard needs to be updated with the latest information and provide recent data and the data mapping exercise needs to be finalized.
