A collective call to strengthen monitoring and evaluation efforts to support healthy and sustainable food systems: ‘The Accountability Pact’

Abstract

There is widespread agreement among experts that a fundamental reorientation of global, regional, national and local food systems is needed to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals Agenda and address the linked challenges of undernutrition, obesity and climate change described as the Global Syndemic. Recognising the urgency of this imperative, a wide range of global stakeholders – governments, civil society, academia, agri-food industry, business leaders and donors – convened at the September 2021 UN Food Systems Summit to coordinate numerous statements, commitments and declarations for action to transform food systems. As the dust settles, how will they be pieced together, how will governments and food corporations be held to account and by whom? New data, analytical methods and global coalitions have created an opportunity and a need for those working in food systems monitoring to scale up and connect their efforts in order to inform and strengthen accountability actions for food systems. To this end, we present – and encourage stakeholders to join or support – an Accountability Pact to catalyse an evidence-informed transformation of current food systems to promote human and ecological health and wellbeing, social equity and economic prosperity.

The INFORMAS healthy food environment policy index in Brazil: Benchmarking, current policies, and determining priorities for the future

“…The application of an internationally developed model for rating national public policies not only has potential but also comes with challenges. 22 The main potential is the possibility to compare Brazilian results with internationally validated parameters, thereby identifying the status of implementation of actions and policies in Brazil and in other countries that have already implemented the protocol. Another advantage of Food-EPI is that national actions are compared with the best international practices in progress, which enables future advocacy with managers based on previously tried and successful actions in other countries.…”

“…The application of an internationally developed model for rating national public policies not only has potential but also comes with challenges 22 . The main potential is the possibility to compare Brazilian results with internationally validated parameters, thereby identifying the status of implementation of actions and policies in Brazil and in other countries that have already implemented the protocol.…”

“…Tackling obesity requires investing in actions in various sectors 21 . The 13 domains of Food‐EPI show this multidimensionality 22 . Among the countries that have already implemented the protocol, there is an effort to create healthier food environments, albeit with low‐to‐very‐low rates of implementation of such actions.…”

“…21 The 13 domains of Food-EPI show this multidimensionality. 22 Among the countries that have already implemented the protocol, there is an effort to create healthier food environments, albeit with low-to-verylow rates of implementation of such actions. In Malaysia and England, none of the domains were considered to have a high rate of implementation.…”

Critical review of indicators, metrics, methods, and tools for monitoring and evaluation of biofortification programs at scale

“…We conducted (1) a mapping review to compile IMMT for biofortification programs; (2) semi-structured interviews (SSIs) with biofortification programming experts (and other relevant stakeholders) to contextualize findings from step 1; and (3) compiled a generic biofortification program Theory of Change (ToC) to use it as an analytical framework for selecting the HLI ( Figure 1 ). This study responds to the collective call to strengthen monitoring and evaluation efforts to support healthy and sustainable food systems—“The Accountability Pact” ( 13 )—and to the need to use rigorous monitoring to guide food system transformation in the countdown to the 2030 global goals ( 12 ). We expect to fill an important gap in the literature concerning best-bet M&E frameworks for biofortification programming.…”