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In 2018, the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN) finalized the discussion paper ‘Schools as a system to improve nutrition’ (UNSCN, 2018), with the invaluable support of several partners: FAO, WFP, UNICEF, WHO, IAEA as well as PCD, WB, BMGF, Bioversity International, and IFPRI. This chapter is a summary of that discussion paper and highlights the role of school gardens in the overall vision of schools as a system to improve nutrition. In addition, it sketches a few recent developments that are of interest for both school-based nutrition programmes and School Health and Nutrition (SHN) interventions, more specifically in the area of school gardens.

The creation of Human Capital is dependent upon good health and education throughout the first 8,000 days of life, but there is currently under-investment in health and nutrition after the first 1,000 days. Working with governments and partners, the UN World Food Program is leading a global scale up of investment in school health, and has undertaken a strategic analysis to explore the scale and cost of meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged school age children and adolescents in low and middle-income countries globally. Of the 663 million school children enrolled in school, 328 million live where the current coverage of school meals is inadequate (20% anemia and stunting), and of these an estimated 73 million children in 60 countries are also living in extreme poverty (

Summary. — This article presents a new analytical tool for ex-ante comparison of the cost-effectiveness of two transfer modalities in pursuing specific nutritional objectives. It does so by introducing a metric to score the nutrient value of a food basket—the Nutrient Value Score (NVS)—and explains how this metric can be combined with full supply chain analysis and costing to generate a new tool, the Omega Value. The use of the Omega Value allows policy-makers who design a program with nutrition objectives to compare direct food transfers and commodity-based food vouchers in terms of both cost efficiency and cost effectiveness. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Income growth alone cannot solve the problem of malnutrition and may in fact create problems linked to overweight and obesity. The challenge from the nutrition perspective is how to sustainably improve the quality of diets, as well as other health-nutrition related behaviours, across different populations and age groups? In nutrition debates in developing countries there is growing interest in the capacity of the private sector to contribute to improved nutrition outcomes. Discussions have incorporated thinking around value chain frameworks, which emerged in the late 1990s to help development actors design interventions that responded to the needs of the private sector and contributed to development outcomes.Value chain approaches can provide useful frameworks to examine the food system and the potential to achieve improved nutritional outcomes by leveraging market-based systems. However, understanding the links between value chains, the overall business environment in which they operate, and nutrition among targeted populations is complex, involving actors and activities working across agriculture, health and nutrition, and very little evidence exists on the potential or the trade-offs involved.In this paper we explore how a value chain framework can inform the design of interventions for achieving improved nutrition. Conceptually, there are three main channels for value chains to improve nutrition: (1) through increased consumption of nutritious foods (a demand side pathway); or (2) through increased incomes from value chain transactions (a supply side pathway) or (3) through increased nutrition value-addition in the chain transactions. These three pathways are interlinked and involve complex dynamics that are not straightforward to understand.We also highlight how these pathways are context specific, and introduce typologies based on supply and demand profile of the specific value chain. Where adequate supply and demand for a specific food exists, interventions would focus on optimising the efficiency and flow of nutrition added-value along the chain. Where demand is constrained or overconsumption is a problem, interventions would work primarily to change consumption patterns, either directly (for example, food transfers) or indirectly (such as, social marketing) shaping market demand. Where supply is constrained, interventions would focus on enhancing supply-side capacity by improving production practices, organising production and post-harvest activities to increase efficiency, and facilitating the expansion of market opportunities. We conclude with a summary of key research areas in this emerging field.