31 July 2013

Nutrition in Zambia: On the Cusp? A Call for Abstracts

Zambia is the next in the IDS series of country-focused collections of papers on undernutrition.

The series has generated the IDS Bulletins on India (2009 and 2012), Pakistan (2013) and now Zambia (2014).

As with the others in the series, the Zambia collection highlights contributions from national researchers, practitioners and policymakers living in Zambia.

Zambia is a mineral-wealthy country in southern Africa, has one of the fastest declines in stunting rates (although still at 45% of all children under 5), has a moderate commitment to hunger and malnutrition reduction as measured by the HANCI index, and is a Scaling Up Nutrition early riser country, so the time is good for this collection.

The collection of short papers will help to do several things (a) strengthen the Zambian network of nutrition commentators, activists, analysts and strategists, (b) provide these professionals additional links to the international nutrition community, (c) generate new insights about the nature of undernutrition in Zambia, what to do about it and how to go about it, and (d) sustain and hopefully increase the momentum within Zambia for undernutrition reduction.

The co-editors of the collection are me, Dr. Cassim Massi the Executive Director of the National Food and Nutrition Commission (pictured above), Musonda Mofu, the Acting Deputy Executive Director of the Commission and Jody Harris, a researcher at IFPRI who is very familiar with Zambian nutrition.

We are now calling for abstracts in the following areas

  1. Determinants of stunting in Zambia
  2. Interventions and Approaches that are proven to work in reducing malnutrition in Zambia 
  3. Approaches to implementing the 1000 Day Programme
  4. What can be done to raise the profile of nutrition within the economic growth agenda?
  5. Policy, capacity, resource and evidence priorities 


Interested authors are asked to submit an abstract of no more than 200 words to j.harris@cgiar.org by September 1, 2013

Authors of selected abstracts will be contacted by the editors by September 15, 2013 and invited to submit a full paper (of no more than 4000 words in length) for consideration by November 30, 2013.

The edited book will be published in mid 2014. Submissions are particularly sought from Zambian authors.

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