In November 2020, the Nutrition Society of Nigeria (NSN) held is 50th Annual General Meeting and Scientific conference titled “Improving Nutrition Intervention Outcomes in Nigeria through Evidence-Based Nutrition, Data Generation and Dissemination” in Kaduna State. DataDENT members remotely led two pre-conference sessions focused on improving data visualization practices in nutrition for over 300 participants.
During the first session, “Data visualization tools for nutrition: Empowering decision-makers to accelerate progress,” Yashodhara Rana (Results for Development) shared consolidated recommendations for best practices and lessons learned from R4D’s global landscaping and user research of nutrition data visualization tools (DVTs). These lessons can be relevent as there is a growing number of DVTs already in use in Nigeria such as the Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) dashboard, Civil Society Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria scorecard, Maternal Newborn Child Health Weeks dashboard, and Saving One Million Lives scorecard. This overview of DVTs set the stage for a conference plenary presentation later in the week on the Nigeria Governor’s Forum (NGF) nutrition scorecard, which is led by NGF and supported by DataDENT. You can access the full DVT findings on the DataDENT website here.
Tricia Aung (Johns Hopkins School of Public Health) led the second session titled “Making better figures: Visualizing Nutrition Data for Action.” This session focused on helping participants choose the most appropriate data visualization based on key messages and audience, and identify what makes a good (and bad) data visualization. The exercises generated animated discussion on data visualization preferences and encouraged participants to reflect on different approaches to data visualization. Tricia conducted a similar training for the Transform Nutrition West Africa Together for Nutrition West African Data Forum February 2020 in Senegal.
DataDENT’s participation in the NSN conference builds on other activities to strengthen the nutrition data value chain in Nigeria. In the upcoming year, DataDENT looks forward to continuing its partnerships with the World Bank-financed Advancing Nutrition Results in Nigeria (ANRiN) project and FMOH nutrition unit on developing a strategy for a nutrition information system (NIS) and expanding work on costing and financing of NIS.
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