– Noveena Swapnabh, Communications Specialist & Drishti Chibber, Research Content Development Officer – WeCan
A unique interactive digital platform brings everyone working on nutrition under one digital roof, and helps them connect, communicate and work with each other.
It is an interactive platform to map all the nutrition partners working in India, across thematic and geographic areas. It helps all the stakeholders involved – implementing organisations,government, funders etc – to stay up to date on all the happenings in the nutrition space. During these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform gives an opportunity to continue collaborating and learning from each other.
Nutrition has been widely acknowledged as a crucial component for the overall development of a country. Government of India’s (GoI) flagship programme, POSHAN Abhiyaan is a crucial step in working towards improving the nutrition indicators of the country.
With the GoI actively supporting nutrition-based interventions, has further made role of all the existing nutrition stakeholders even more crucial. Their areas of work cover a range of themes. However, all the stakeholders tend to work in silos. Key nutrition partners identified the gap and conceptualised C2IQ- Coverage, Continuity, Intensity and Quality Partners Forum to address this gap. WeCan in association with core partners, namely, Alive & Thrive (A&T), Coalition for Nutrition Security (CFNS) and UNICEF has been facilitating these convenings across various states; state specific partners and concerned government departments.
While the partner collaborations have been facilitated through C2IQ forum, in today’s digital world it became pertinent to connect all nutrition stakeholders on a virtual platform for the ease of access. With this rationale, WeCan has taken the collaboration to the next level by launching an online Nutrition Platform for partners, stakeholders, and funding agencies. It is an endeavour to foster partnerships and collaborations on a digital platform to achieve the targets of POSHAN Abhiyaan.
The platform entails a POSHAN Stockroom, a knowledge repository with all the literature, reports, documents and publications related to nutrition developed nationally as well as globally. It acts as a knowledge hub where partners can upload their interventions, learnings, events, training modules, reports, case studies, and any publications they want to share. The repository is classified in different themes around child, adolescent, pregnant women and maternal nutrition. The Platform will act as an aid to do preliminary research before starting any new intervention and help organisations focus on their functional expertise and collaborate with others for the expertise they have.
The platform also provides an expansive database of all the nutrition partners across the country based on their geographical presence and their functional expertise. It requires an easy registration on the platform to access all the features and the partner information.
One can easily access a Nutrition Radar- a dashboard developed by CTARA-Indian Institute of Technology Bombay showcasing the normalized performance of NFHS-4 indicators that directly or indirectly impact or indicate the status of maternal and child health and nutrition at state and district level with respect to best and worst performance of parameters within each domain.
Additionally, registered partners can post their events and an auto-enable feature will notify all the stakeholders on the platform and upload their job opportunities, tenders and RFPs.
It is a dynamic platform that is constantly being updated from time to time. It can be used by partner organisations for sharing of knowledge, funders to make informed decisions and evengovernment departments to analyse best practices that can be scaled up and implemented in other areas as well. It is a digital networking space that facilitates resource effective decision making.
WeCan acknowledges the amount of innovative and highly effective work being done in the field of nutrition. The aim is to get all the stakeholders to talk to each other, learn from each other and not keep reinventing the wheel and avoid duplication.
Hence, it is believed that to achieve the nutrition targets set by POSHAN Abhiyaan, nutrition partners must all work swiftly, efficiently, and most importantly, must all work together.
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