GAIN's Approach to Nutrition-Sensitive Social Protection
Through partnerships, policy advocacy, and programmes, GAIN works in seven countries to make social protection systems more nutrition-sensitive and better equipped to combat systemic and intergenerational inequities that limit the reach of vital services.
Improving the nutrition impacts of social protection requires targeted improvements to programme designs. GAIN believes that good social protection design involves meaningfully leveraging vulnerable beneficiaries’ voices. Doing so can help administrators better understand how to overcome constraints and address beneficiaries’ specific nutritional needs. Beneficiaries have the advantage of proximity to the key issues: they understand their specific constraints and challenges better than any other system actors. While the need to incorporate beneficiaries’ perspectives, and the value of doing so, is well accepted by social protection administrators, they often face substantial hurdles to doing so in practice: logistical constraints, language barriers, differing value systems, power dynamics, and other factors make meaningful engagement with beneficiaries a significant challenge. GAIN has set out to identify ways to support administrators to overcome these constraints, particularly through human-centered design (HCD).
Through an innovative intervention called Emo Demos, about 12,680 women learned about the importance of breastfeeding. Meet Madalena, one of these women who learned to care for herself and her children during pregnancy and breastfeeding.
In March, GAIN attended the 68th Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), an annual event held at the UN Headquarters in New York that brings together stakeholders from all over the world to discuss the state of gender equality and women’s empowerment, resulting in Agreed Conclusions.
