Following a very successful and highly competitive Research Call for Proposals under LANSA’s second Responsive Window, seven groups of researchers and practitioners have been awarded!  

The winners are: Action Against Hunger; BRAC Afghanistan; Institute for Financial Management and Research; University of Heidelberg; University of Queensland; University of Sydney; and Vaagdhara.

The awarded studies will conduct exciting formative and feasibility studies in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. They will deliver a body of research on potential interventions in agriculture designed to improve nutrition and health outcomes especially in women and children.

LANSA received nearly 90 research proposals covering research in Afghanistan (3), Bangladesh (7), India (33) and Pakistan (35), as well as seven bids for multi-country studies. Shortlisted applicants were asked to prepare and submit full research proposals. These were then reviewed by the internal review team and an external panel using a standard scoring system, and the best were awarded. 

LANSA Responsive Window opportunity

This facility seeks to engender a wider sense of engagement among national and regional stakeholders in the core challenge of improving the impact of agri-food systems, policies, programmes and interventions on nutrition. 

Applications proposing new and innovative interventions in any area of agriculture for nutrition and / or to test the feasibility of scaling-up such innovations were invited under LANSA's second responsive window call in July-August 2015. The initiative was for our Pillar 3 research - aiming to define a suite of interventions in agriculture that have the potential to have positive impacts on nutrition outcomes, especially in women and children.

Earlier in 2015, LANSA had in May-June requested ideas to support the Call via an online consultation hosted by United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition and many ideas received here helped to frame the Responsive Window Call. We received a total of 52 exchange-responses with brilliant ideas!

Ahead of the online dialogue, Alan Dangour, Lead for Pillar 3 studies under LANSA, posted a blog on Secure Nutrition platform inviting agriculture-nutrition stakeholders to prompt a discussion on out-of-the-box ideas ‘nutrition-sensitive agriculture’ initiatives around the world.  

The successful research proposals are:

For Afghanistan:

• Promoting collective vegetables gardening by adolescent girls for reducing malnutrition in Afghanistan / BRAC Afghanistan (lead)

For Bangladesh:

• Household Duck rearing as a tool to combat malnutrition and poverty among rural communities in Bangladesh / University of Queensland, Australia (lead)
• Biochar Urine Nutrient Cycling for Health (BUNCH); A feasibility study of organic nutrient cycling to enhance homestead food production for improved nutrition / University of Heidelberg, Germany (lead)
• Feasibility of an integrated agriculture and nutrition behaviour change intervention to improve maternal and child nutrition in rural Bangladesh / University of Sydney, Australia (lead)

For India:

• Design suitable approach for promoting Nutrition Sensitive Farming System (NSFS) as foundation for Healthy tribal Community in Banswara, India / Vaagdhara (lead)
• Female agricultural labour and nutrition: resolving conflicting time demands / Institute for Financial Management and Research 

For Pakistan:

• People's perspective and feasibility of Kitchen Gardening under different geographical and environmental contexts / Action Against Hunger, Pakistan

The research projects are now underway and will continue in 2017. Updates about the ongoing research and research outputs will be posted on LANSA’s website.

For more information, contact Sangeetha Rajeesh at sangeetha.lansa@gmail.com

LANSA is led by M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, and its partners include BRAC, Collective for Social Science Research, the Institute of Development Studies, International Food Policy Research Institute and the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health. The consortium is funded by the UK’s Department for International Development.