Reducing foodborne disease in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is crucial for advancing nutrition, health, and other development goals. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)/Feed the Future’s Evidence and Action Towards Safe, Nutritious Food (EatSafe) program sought to harness consumer demand as a mechanism to improve food safety practices and generate evidence on how to raise consumer demand for safe, nutritious foods in traditional market settings—the main source of food for most LMIC consumers.
Buguruni market is a traditional food market in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania with about 2,630 vendors selling their produce to about 70,000 consumers daily. In a rapid assessment conducted in 2020, almost a third of consumers reported concerns related to food safety when shopping in the market.
EatSafe: Evidence and Action Towards Safe, Nutritious Food (EatSafe) is a USAID Feed
the Future programme that works in traditional markets in Nigeria and Ethiopia to
improve food safety.
We expect to be eating peanuts, not extreme amounts of aflatoxins, and chicken but not E. coli. We expect that our salads are washed with clean water, and that the person who prepared the salad first washed their hands. We cannot, however, always assume the expected and thus need to be ready for the unexpected. Unexpected events can take the form of natural disasters, such as earthquakes or floods. They might also come from power cuts or amid sudden political change. Such events can disrupt food availability, accessibility and safety, leaving us exposed to increased levels of unsafe food.
At the 77th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) voiced its support for the WHO Global Strategy for Food Safety and reducing the risks in traditional markets.
“Be the voice of the children” - that was a key messages of a panel discussion held at the 2024 Sankalp Africa Summit on a sunny morning in Nairobi. It focused on how investors and those who work with them can adapt their approaches to better support children’s nutrition.
Among the five panellists — representing GAIN, the World Food Programme, UNICEF, Save the Children, and a local enterprise, Shalem Investment Limited — the motivation for doing this was clear. Children are the future, comprising nearly half of the African population at present and growing fast — expected to reach 1 billion by 2055. They thus have the potential to accelerate development not only in Africa but worldwide. But that potential is currently limited by malnutrition.
Feed The Future's EatSafe: Evidence and Action Towards Safe, Nutritious Food is a USAID-funded programme aiming to enable lasting improvements in the safety of nutritious foods in traditional markets by focusing on behaviour change.
Sadia Kaenzig, Head of Communications and Caroline DeWaal, Deputy Director at EatSafe speak about the importance and impact of food safety.
As part of EatSafe's effort to evaluate the impacts of food safety behavior change interventions, this report summarized food safety behaviors and behavior drivers across four food safety macro-indices, assessed via structured surveys of vendors and consumers in Nigeria.
As part of EatSafe's effort to evaluate the impacts of food safety behavior change interventions, this report summarized food safety behaviors and behavior drivers across four food safety macro-indices, assessed via structured surveys of vendors and consumers in Hawassa, Ethiopia.
