The Surveillance of Climate‐Smart Agriculture for Nutrition (SCAN) project produces a near real-time monitoring of nutrition outcomes from agricultural interventions, enabled by a novel compound metric and surveillance system, for application in development initiatives on a national and continental scale.
This demand-driven project responds to urgent requests by the African Union’s New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (AU-NEPAD) and the African Climate-Smart Agriculture Alliance (ACSAA) to develop methods for monitoring outcomes of their large-scale climate-smart agriculture-based development initiatives.
| Key Activities: |
- The first work package is a collaborative effort between development partners, scientists and government representatives in co-developing a framework of the pathways by which agricultural interventions influence nutrition outcomes. This framework guides the subsequent selection of a practical set of indicators (e.g. cost-effective and sensitive) of agriculture, nutrition risk, and status, to monitor by surveillance approaches.
- The second work package co‐develops a mobile-based surveillance system. Instead of creating a unique collection platform, SCAN’s approach integrates existing systems used by a range of institutions and development projects. The product is a unified and coherent dataset derived from these disparate collection methodologies.
- Data collected during pilot testing forms the basis for evaluating the potential of a novel metric, based on hyper-volume geometry, for monitoring of agriculture and nutrition interactions, the final work package.
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| Key Results / Outputs: |
- While piloting this integrated data collection and surveillance system in Zambia and Ethiopia, SCAN addressed critical research gaps and operational barriers facing the collection of high‐quality data via mobile reporting.This unique approach captures the full complexity of variation in agriculture‐nutrition status in multiple dimensions within a population. Further, SCAN’s approach allows for simple analyses of differences in outcomes for various sub-populations or under a range of agricultural interventions.
- Outputs of the SCAN project set the benchmark for agriculture-nutrition surveillance by creating a cross-discipline and -institution platform, and generating novel multi-disciplinary research contributions.
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| Key Outcomes: |
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The proposed surveillance system has the potential to change the conversation around agriculture and nutrition monitoring and planning.
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When appended to climate-smart agriculture programs, SCAN elicits a tangible pathway for results to be immediately actionable at scale.
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Photo credit: Danyell Odhiambo | Farmer Philemon Onyango (Left) and project team admire an overgrown Gliricidia tree planted in his farm.
