Author: Dr. Charulatha Banerjee

The first week of November saw the coming together of key members of the ENN SUN KM team in Kathmandu for the SUN Global Gathering (GG) 2019. The ENN  team comprised of the directors Jeremy Shoham, Carmel Dolan and Emily Mates, the SUN KM project Global Coordinator Natalie Sessions and myself as the Asia Regional KM Specialist. Judith Hodge in her role as the Co Editor of Nutrition Exchange was also part of the team. It was 4 days of putting faces to names for all of us and for me in particular to understand the scope and breadth of the SUN Movement’s impact on the countries across the world who have signed up.

In 2019 ENN, continuing its case studies series on Multisectoral programming at the Subnational level, plans to study two more countries -Philippines and Zimbabwe, within the final year of the TAN project. With this in mind, in July, accompanied by the Global Knowledge Management Coordinator, Natalie Sessions, I visited the Philippines’ capital Manila for a scoping visit. In this week we intended to understand the history of nutrition plans and programmes in the country, the burden of malnutrition and district level variance, the structure of implementation hierarchy for nutrition programming and how this fits in with the existing governance structure in the country, the different multisectoral nutrition programmes in place and the factors that have supported nutrition improvement in the country.

I participated in a Round Table organised by South Asia Food and Nutrition Security Initiative SAFANSI In Colombo in June which was titled “Putting the Lens on the Consumer in Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture and Food Systems in South Asia”.

Before I share highlights from the 2-day event, here is some background on SAFANSI -