DataDENT and our local partner Nutrition, Agriculture and Health Initiative (NAHI) are close to finishing an assessment among national and sub-national actors implementing Nigeria’s National Multisectoral Plan of Action for Food and Nutrition (NMPFAN) 2021-2025. Our aims are to understand how food and nutrition stakeholders outside of the health sector use data and to identify where along the nutrition data value chain investment is needed to improve data use.
We recently completed 92 interviews with government and development partners at federal, state (Oyo & Kebbi) and local government authority (LGA) levels. In-depth analysis and validation of findings is ongoing, but we can share some early reflections from our country team.
Icon. Nutrition assessment in Nigeria
Who needs which nutrition indicators?
Many of our subnational respondents serve as nutrition focal points for ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) engaged in agricultural production, food safety, WASH, school meals, and cash transfer programs. When asked about the data they regularly use, we were surprised by how few state- and LGA-level respondents from government mentioned data related to nutrition outcomes such as diet quality, stunting or anaemia. Instead, they described collecting and reporting more general program inputs and activities. This led our DataDENT team to ask – who at subnational needs to be using what types of data?
State level: In Nigeria’s decentralized system, State Committees on Food and Nutrition (SCFN) are responsible for overseeing multisector nutrition implementation and achieving results. They contextualize the national strategy into a state-level nutrition action plan. To do this, the SCFN needs to identify what is driving malnutrition in their state and to prioritize interventions that address these causes. Population-based survey data, disaggregated to the state level, is essential for this process. These data are also needed to track state-level progress in achieving nutrition impact.
Our review of state-level policy documents from the past five years suggests that health sector interventions such as IYCF promotion and micronutrient supplementation are being prioritized based on nutrition outcomes like breastfeeding practices and child stunting. However, subnational policies and plans do not reference state-specific data to support how interventions by agriculture, social protection, WASH, education and other sectors will impact nutrition. A consequence is that state and LGA level nutrition focal points for these sectors cannot clearly articulate how their prioritized actions link to nutrition. We heard this from state-level WASH sector respondent:
‘Currently our data system for WASH related indicators such as water access, sanitation coverage and hygiene practices are quite robust. But we often lack comprehensive nutrition data, especially at our community level. … at a community level we should be able to take data on both – child nutritional status…should be collected frequently, and it should be linked with WASH.’ (State WASH key informant)
LGA level: Once a state’s multisectoral nutrition action plan is set, each MDA should know what activities they will implement and how they will monitor progress and quality. For example, in agriculture, if the plan is to increase production of micronutrient-rich foods by providing training and inputs to women farmers, then the data monitored need to show whether these activities were completed at the right time (e.g. seeds given in time for planting season), and inputs and training given to the targeted population (e.g. households with women of reproductive age).
Our state and LGA interviews suggest that most nutrition stakeholders outside the health sector do not have these data in part, because the state-level multisector plans do not include a monitoring framework that guides each MDA on what indicators they need to report and at what frequency. They also face constraints related to how their MDA-specific routine information systems are structured. The health sector’s HMIS/DHIS-2 system can track individual-level service delivery, but information systems in other sectors are not structured to do this. So, either indicators need to be adapted to fit existing systems, or new systems need to be created, which can be costly and difficult to sustain.
What is needed now?
In our interviews, state and LGA level actors requested technical assistance and financial resources to support nutrition-related data collection and use. This includes identifying priority indicators that can be collected through existing MDA systems and building data literacy to make better use of data that are already available in surveys and other sources. States need clear multisector nutrition monitoring frameworks that are harmonized with national strategies but also prioritize the unique information needs of SCFN and LGA-level actors.
In early February, the Federal Government of Nigeria launched the Nutrition 774 Initiative—a flagship program aimed at ensuring sustainable, high-impact nutrition interventions at the grassroots level across Nigeria’s 774 LGAs. This new initiative creates a window of opportunity to discuss new approaches to nutrition monitoring across sectors. DataDENT team is working to share our assessment findings with N-774 leadership and offer practical recommendations on how to strengthen nutrition information systems beyond the health sector.
In the coming year, we will be sharing our Nigeria assessment findings to global audiences through briefs and manuscripts. The learning from Nigeria and our parallel work in Ethiopia will be reflected in global goods about data literacy and recommended frequency of data collection. Keep following DataDENT social media to receive updates on this work.