"How can Kosovo improve access to nutritional food for children under 5 by 2030?"
The Covid-19 pandemic has made everyone aware of the weaknesses in our food systems and the urgent need to build resilience, sustainability, equity and health into them, and we now have the opportunity to take action to address these challenges. In order to effect lasting change we must create the spaces within which these ideas can be put to the pressure test of reality, and particularly the messy world of politics, vested and conflicting interests, trade-offs and unintended consequences.
While science provides an increasingly robust case for urgent transformative action and pinpointing the changes that are required to make food production and consumption more equitable, sustainable and healthy, we are lagging in action to change policy, business practices and consumption behaviors. It is clear that from pregnancy to the first three years after birth, the health, well-being and exposed activities lay the foundation of a person that lasts a lifetime.
Recent research by UNICEF (2021) shows that nutrition indicators for children have not improved over the past 5 years. Nearly 23% of Kosovo’s children live in poverty, 7% live in extreme poverty. Spending on social protection is well below the EU average (8.5% of GDP compared to 28%) and limits the ability to reduce poverty and inequality, in part because children aren’t directly addressed in the social programs.
EAT and the University of Cambridge have formed a partnership to apply the tried and tested Cambridge Policy Boot Camp methodology to relevant Solutions Cohorts and corresponding food system policy challenges governments want to tackle, with the purpose of stimulating policy improvements and implementation of collective solutions. Specifically, this workshop seeks to address the question:
"How can Kosovo improve access to nutritional food for children under 5 by 2030?"
Anchor Agency: Ministry of Health, Government of Kosovo
Beneficiary Agency: Ministry of Health, Government of Kosovo
Participating Agencies:
- UBT, Ministry of Health Kosovo
- National Institute of Public Health
- University Clinical Centre -Paediatrics Department- UCCK
- Centre for Diabetes Control, Institute of Public Health Prizren
- Committee on Health in the Kosovo Parliament, UNDP