Launch of the COVID-19 impact on nutrition Analytical Framework

The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the world affecting organizations and institutions that supported the delivery of nutrition programs at all levels. To timely respond to the needs of the nutrition community, the Agile Core Team for Nutrition Monitoring (ACT-NM) group, a collaboration amongst UNICEF, USAID, WHO and USAID Advancing Nutrition, developed an analytical framework for exploring pathways for the impact of COVD-19 pandemic on key nutrition outcomes.

The comprehensive analytical framework encompasses the six maternal, infant and young children nutrition targets endorsed by WHA, the outcomes monitored towards the elimination of malnutrition in all its forms, one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) targets.

Linking the overarching categories of food, health, social protection, education, water, and sanitation to outcomes and impacts of COVID-19 on nutrition, the Analytical Framework the is an useful tool that allows users to construct context-specific pathways to study the impact of COVID-19 and future shocks.

The Analytical Framework Visualizer can be accessed at https://www.who.int/tools/covid19-nutrition-analytical-framework

Health care professionals, community health workers, business owners, and policy makers can all delve into the impacts of a given shock, exploring various contexts that expand into underlying determinants. Policy makers can also click on the visualizer’s interactive features to expand, collapse, and build out their own pathways and explore the impacts of specific shocks, such as a lockdown or supply chain disruption. The tool allows for the download a pool of potential data sources for the several factors included in the framework, the data mapping tool.