Infant Nutrition Expert (West / Central Africa)

Infant Nutrition Expert

(West / Central Africa)

Scope of Work

Start Date**:** August 2024

Tentative Duration: August 2024 to January 2025

Location: Remote with travel to selected country offices

About MAGENTA

MAGENTA is a leading Social and Behavioural Change (SBC) Research and Communications agency that specializes in understanding human decision-making processes to design communications solutions for positive change in fragile and development settings. We implement programmes across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, using the latest in behavioural science principles and a rigorous approach to research, strategy, campaign design and implementation.

Our client base includes UN agencies, INGOs, governments and the private sector. We aim to amplify the voices of local actors while bringing international expertise and methodological rigour. To do so, we partner with civil society, creative agencies, media, and academics to design innovative, relevant and impactful solutions to some of the most challenging problems of our time. Whether we are aiming to shift parenting practices to improve children’s outcomes or to understand how social norms underpin corruption, we always go the extra mile to ensure we can create positive impact for some of the most underserved populations in the world.

MAGENTA has been working in the region since 2019, conducting innovative and challenging behaviour research that are used to inform the design and implementation of social and behaviour change interventions to tackle challenges around social cohesion, health practices, and preserving the environment.

Background

With approximately 60% in WCA and 10% of children in the Sahel suffering from wasting due to food insecurity, WCA has witnessed limited progress in improving the Minimum Dietary Diversity, indicating a lack of essential nutrients for optimal growth for children. In 2023, an estimated 16.5 million children under the age of 5 are affected by acute and chronic malnutrition, reflecting the poor quality of children’s diets. In Western and Central Africa, 1 child out of 3 is stunted due to malnutrition and only 18% of children under 2 years of age are being fed a minimum of 5 food groups (out of 8 food groups) daily.

On the one hand, access to nutritious and diverse food is hindered by its unaffordability, compounded by socio-political crises and climate change that impede access to essential WASH and health services. On the other hand, WCA region’s ecosystem, qualified as the most fragile in the world, and the poor marketing and infrastructure conditions constraint production capacities, resulting in high rates of imports and consumers’ heavy reliance on markets for food. Despite significant dependence of households on agriculture for their livelihoods, commercial-level importation of food items remains high, causing challenges of accessibility and availability of nutritious food products on the markets.

To combat this challenge, UNICEF WCARO has developed the First Foods initiative: First Foods initiative to bring systematic, climate-friendly, and sustainable solutions to malnutrition in WCA via 3 pillars:

1. Normative framework: Develop clear norms for complementary feeding and support certification to equalize all the stakeholders working on the nutrition value chain for children ​
2. Stimulating demand and promotion of nutritious foods, including through community-led efforts. ​
3. Incentivizing nutritious and affordable production: Support the micro, small and medium enterprises committed to increase the production, transformation, and transport of nutritious complementary foods using locally produced food items especially those food group that are missing in children diet.

Objectives

UNICEF WCARO wishes to leverage the power of Social Marketing to support Pillar 2 of the “First Foods” initiative which focuses on stimulating demand and promotion of underutilised food groups.

1. Better understand the barriers and motivators to the uptake of diverse food groups and benchmark effectively initiatives that have been conducted in the past to develop effective strategies to stimulate the demand and promotion of diversified nutritious foods at the household and community levels.
2. Accompany the UNICEF Country Offices nutrition teams in building their capacity to develop and roll out effective Social Marketing interventions in a sustainable and scalable manner.

MAGENTA will support UNICEF in understanding the context, developing the nutrition strategy, and coaching the country offices in further developing and finalizing the strategies (1 per ecological zone) and operational plans (1 per country).

The participating countries are:

• Sahel Ecological Zone: Mauritania (quant and qual research), Burkina Faso, Mali (qual)
• Coastal Ecological Zone: Ivory Coast (quant and qual research), Sierra Leone and Bénin (qual)
• Central Ecological Zone: DRC (quant and qual)

Key Responsibilities / Tasks

You will provide regional infant nutrition guidance throughout all phases of this assignment. You will co-deliver the three co-creation workshops (aimed at coming up with interventions to improve infant nutrition outcomes), help analyse the workshop findings, and support development of the strategies into implementation plans and educational materials that will support rollout of the interventions (by UNICEF Country Offices). More specifically, you will be responsible for the following during the different components of the project.

Based on the findings of the data collection and the literature review, MAGENTA will develop 3 Social Marketing strategies per ecological zone and one intervention implementation plan per participating country. These will be designed in such a way that they are context-specific, scalable, and effective.

• Provide technical nutritional expertise during weekly project meetings.
• Review the co-creation workshop agendas and presentation slide decks.
• Produce inputs for the co-creation workshop exercises based on nutritional expertise (e.g., converting key research findings into slides).
• Co-facilitate the three co-creation workshops alongside the MAGENTA team.
• Review and add content to the three co-creation workshop write-up documents, adding feedback regarding the nutritional component(s) of the prototypes developed.
• Provide technical nutritional expertise regarding the first drafts of the strategies, providing a set of recommendations.
• Review the final implementation plans for accuracy and detail from a nutritional science point of view.
• Develop educational materials (i.e., written content) that supports prototyping and then implementation of the strategies developed in the co-creation workshops. This includes will include coaching tools to help field staff execute the implementation plans FAQ documents and conversation scripts

Deliverables:

Deliverable

Envisaged deadline

Workshop agenda and slide deck reviewed with added workshop exercises

22nd August 2024

3 workshop reports reviewed and approved by the client

04th October 2024

Final strategies and implementation plans reviewed and approved by the client

25th October 2024

Final set of recommendations and toolkit package reviewed and approved by the client

31st January 2025

• The maximum duration for this work is 30 days.

Technical Requirements

• Master’s degree or PhD in one or more of the following disciplines: Nutrition, Social Marketing, Public/Environmental Health, Political Science, or a related field.
• Excellent knowledge of infant nutrition policies and past programming in Western and Central Africa – including work in the field.
• Excellent knowledge of French and English – all deliverables and communications are to be done in both French and English.
• At least 5 years of experience facilitating workshops and developing social and behaviour change (SBC) strategies.
• Ability to work effectively, respectfully, and successfully with governments, clients, partners and other stakeholders in complex settings
• Ability to travel to the participating countries
• Experience working with UN agencies, or other INGOs is an asset.
• Experience working with Western and Central African governments is an asset.