Since the COVID-19 pandemic spread in early 2020, it has repeatedly highlighted the numerous direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic and other shocks on nutrition. For example, restrictions on public mobility, declines in global trade and economic activity, curtailed access to services and reduced care seeking behaviors due to fear of COVID-19 infection — combined with the diversion of resources to the COVID-19 response — quickly disrupted the flow of day-to-day life in ways that directly and indirectly affect nutritional outcomes for children and adults.
Several conceptual models linking COVID-19 with nutrition outcomes were published over the last 2 years but a framework that captured the full multi-sectoral nature of nutrition was missing. The UNICEF-USAID-WHO Agile Core Team for Nutrition Monitoring (ACT-NM) has developed a comprehensive Analytical Framework that captures the full range of factors that can affect nutrition outcomes in children and adults.
Use The Analytical Framework below, or click this link to open it in a new window
Published by: UNICEF, USAID, WHO, USAID Advancing Nutrition
This framework is well poised to:
- Allow policymakers and implementers to better identify and assess potential pathways tracking the intersection between the secondary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and nutrition.
- Provide a useful tool for planning policies, programs, and interventions.
- Help identify data gaps.
- Serve as a structure to model efforts across multiple pathways.
- Support an integrated, systems approach to nutrition challenges caused, increased, or intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemics/crises.
It is flexible and adaptable allowing new elements to be added within the framework to respond to the evolving context in a country.