The mNutrition Initiative
Close to 2 billion people survive on diets that lack vital vitamins and nutrients needed to grow properly, live healthy lives and raise a healthy family. Poor access to agricultural and health information has been recognised as a major barrier in the uptake of improved nutritional practises, particularly by women and vulnerable groups in marginalised areas
To address this, CABI and its partners in the DFID mNutrition initiative delivered mNutrition to support local organisations to develop content for mobile phone-based messaging services aimed at increasing knowledge of nutrition and health within communities in 12 countries, particularly women of reproductive age.
The content made available here includes the mobile messages produced within the mNutrition initiative. Content comprises health, agriculture and food- based nutrition SMS and voice message transcripts. All content is available free of charge under a creative commons licence CC-BY.
The Content and Local Process
The content is a product of the GSMA-led mNutrition Initiative funded with UK aid from the UK government from 2014-2017. The content stream of mNutrition was delivered by a CABI-led consortium of Global Content Partners (GCPs). The GCP designed a structured process in which to develop country-specific factsheets and associated mobile message transcripts, and in some countries, voice recordings.
The GCPs delivered mNutrition content through engagement and capacity building of local content partners (LCPs). The role of the LCPs was to create localised content through a structured process of content drafts, edits, technical review, translation, end user testing, validation, adherence to quality assurance and publication. In doing this, LCPs engaged throughout with partnerships across the private sector, NGOs, international institutions, universities and government departments. Through this process, LCPs ensured messages are locally appropriate (i.e. local languages, cultural contexts and motivations), relevant and practical.
The work of the GCPs included creating national nutrition landscape analyses and content frameworks to help guide the prioritisation of key interventions; defining a content structure, implementing a rigorous quality assurance process on the content - including government and nutrition stakeholder validation, quality control sampling and support for end user testing and providing training to local content partners.
