Locust control campaign covers millions of hectares, but the voracious pest is still a threat in East Africa

Early and ongoing rains have led to a new cycle of breeding and fresh swarms are forming in Ethiopia, Somalia and Yemen. Immature hopper bands have also been identified in Eritrea, The Sudan and Saudi Arabia and are likely to form new swarms.
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Micronutrient Survey Manual and Toolkit

UNICEF, WHO, CDC and Nutrition International have released the Micronutrient Survey Manual and digitized Toolkit. Nutrition stakeholders around the world can now access expanded and digitized resources needed to conduct micronutrient surveys and evaluations.

Globally, at least 1 in 2 children under 5 suffers from hidden hunger due to deficiencies in vitamins and other essential micronutrients. Hidden hunger harms children - it undermines their capacity to grow, develop and learn to their full potential. Accurate and reliable nutrition data provides evidence for policy makers to better understand and tackle this nutrition problem. 

The user-friendly format of the new survey manual and toolkit allows program managers, researchers and government officials alike to access and search the entire knowledge library of best practices and resources for micronutrient status assessment on an interactive website. There is also a downloadable platform that functions just like the website and enables these resources to be accessible to users offline. The content includes 16 modules of information and more than 200 tools, examples and resources in a searchable platform.

 

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Empowering women to leave no one behind

FAO and African Union launch Regional Outlook on Gender and Agrifood Systems
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FAO calls for stepping up forest and landscape restoration

Efforts to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide must be scaled up to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, said FAO in a new publication released today.
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African countries commit to accelerate actions towards food security

Around 900 delegates including 95 ministers and other government officials from 48 countries have met in the context of rising food insecurity and malnutrition exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and multiple overlapping crisis - climate change, transboundary pests and diseases, conflict and economic downturns.
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FAO aims to untap Africa’s potential to end hunger and malnutrition

"We meet in trying times, but the opportunities ahead of us give me hope," the FAO Director-General. "Africa is the continent of untapped potential and remains a key priority for me. I am convinced that agricultural and rural development are the keys to winning the battle against poverty and hunger in Africa."
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FAO’s Hand-in-Hand initiative can help end hunger and poverty in Africa

Agriculture ministers from across Africa, representatives from the African Union, the civil society and the private sector, and other partners, recognized the role FAO’s Hand-in-Hand Initiative can play in ending poverty and hunger.
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FAO and OIE kickstart global initiative to stop spread of deadly pig disease

As African swine fever (ASF) marches swiftly across countries affecting food security and livelihoods of some of the world’s most vulnerable populations, FAO and OIE are calling on all nations and partners to join forces to keep this deadly pig disease at bay under a new initiative.
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WHO Bulletin Call for Papers: Behavioural and Social Sciences for Better Health

Deadline for submissions: 31 December 2020

What drives people towards tobacco use? What prevents people from doing physical exercise or adopting preventive measures during a pandemic? What increases the likelihood that someone will adhere to treatment or seek appropriate health care?

While a growing body of knowledge provides insights into these questions, factoring behavioural evidence effectively into health policies and programmes can be challenging. For example, health programmes often rest on the assumption that people will act in their best interest once we increase their awareness and knowledge. Yet, we know that this increase is insufficient for a behaviour to change. Because of inertia and preference for short-term rewards, people may continue with their unhealthy habits, despite improved health literacy. Certain health policies underestimate the importance of social norms and the fact that our behaviours are influenced by our perceptions of how other people think and act. Some interventions focus only on the human factor, without giving attention to environmental and structural issues that determine what options are available and how these options are presented to the population.

Too often, considerations around behaviours are only discussed in the implementation phase; but effective health policies and strategies require raising critical behavioural issues and questions much earlier, when broad policy objectives are discussed and designed. If we expect policy-makers and practitioners to increase the use of behavioural and social sciences, the global community of experts needs to provide easy access to evidence, tools, expertise and examples of use.

Behaviours are the result of complex interactions among cognitive, emotional, social and environmental drivers. To understand these, we need to draw theories and evidence from a variety of fields: sociology, behavioural sciences, behavioural economics, cognitive sciences, psychology, anthropology, humanities, communications, marketing, design thinking and system thinking.

To achieve health for all, policy-makers and practitioners need deeper insights into what shapes individual and collective behaviours among the general population as well as among practitioners and health-care workers who design and deliver health and social care. As part of its efforts to scale up the use of behavioural and social sciences in public health, the World Health Organization created a multidisciplinary technical advisory group for behavioural insights and sciences for health in 2020. The Bulletin of the World Health Organization will publish a theme issue on behavioural and social sciences for better health in 2021. We invite practitioners and researchers, particularly from low- and middle-income countries, to submit manuscripts with original research, reviews, perspectives and lessons from the field on the unique opportunities the behavioural and social sciences provide in achieving health for all.

We are interested in behaviourally informed approaches, interventions and reforms that have been shown to improve public health. In particular, we will welcome manuscripts that illustrate how behavioural sciences have been used for the design of policies and programmes; how behaviours of key players – including, but not only, at the population level – are addressed within health systems; how robust behavioural evidence can be gathered despite time and financial constraints; and how innovative approaches can help in overcoming these constraints. We hope submissions will provide evidence as to how multidisciplinary approaches improve the quality of behaviourally informed interventions; if and how existing behavioural theories and models are relevant to low- and middle-income countries; and how to build knowledge and skills relevant to behavioural and social sciences among health workers, practitioners and policy-makers.

The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2020. Manuscripts should be submitted in accordance with the Bulletin’s guidelines for contributors (available at: http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes796/1/18-990118/en) and the cover letter should mention this call for papers.

The call for papers was published in the October 2020 issue and can be accessed here.

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Canada and the U.S. join FAO in commemorating the UN agency’s 75th anniversary at the opening of the informal North America regional conference

Many of the global challenges FAO was set up to tackle are back in force today, high-level participants at FAO’s Informal North American regional conference said today. “Our mission is not yet accomplished,” Director-General QU Dongyu said at a virtual event celebrating FAO’s 75h anniversary.
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Strong support for innovation and digital technologies in Latin America and the Caribbean

During the three-day virtual meeting (19 - 21 October) hosted by the Government of Nicaragua, all 33 Members, as well as representatives from civil society and the private sector, highlighted the importance of developing and applying innovative approaches to overcome the challenges facing food and agriculture in the region, particularly in relation to scaling up the use of digital tools.
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Director-General engages with Italian parliamentarians on partnership potential

Italy’s agri-food system offers lessons on the transformations the world needs, and the nation is playing a critical role by promoting a multilateral food coalition that is closely aligned to FAO’s own framework, Director-General QU Dongyu said today in an address to members of Italy’s parliament.
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