Women’s Nutrition

In 2012, we published a technical background paper summarising the existing evidence on maternal nutrition interventions and identifying knowledge gaps to address maternal undernutrition in emergencies. 

Over a decade later, substantial gaps still remained in our understanding of the state of women’s nutrition globally. Therefore, over the past few years we have been updating and expanding our knowledge base accordingly, and formally established a new project for ENN on women’s nutrition in mid-2020. 

In 2021, we published our first State of Play report summarising evidence, policy and practice relating to all areas of women’s nutrition. In researching this, it became clear that there was a particular dearth of evidence and shared learning coming from humanitarian contexts. In 2022, we therefore summarised progress in our second State of Play report on women’s nutrition in humanitarian contexts, accompanied by an in-depth case study from Madagascar.  

Over recent years there has been continued global momentum on progressing women’s and adolescent girls’ nutrition, including a focus on daily multiple micronutrient supplements (MMS), received through antenatal care platforms. Despite the encouraging progress, we still found that there was limited consolidated information on the extent to which women and adolescent girls receive MMS in humanitarian emergencies. In 2024, we therefore aimed to fill some of these knowledge gaps through publishing our third State of Play, focussing on MMS in humanitarian contexts, accompanied by two in-depth case studies from Somalia and Pakistan. 

We aim to synthesise the latest evidence, policy and practice related to women’s nutrition and make recommendations on the next steps needed to fill related gaps.