Scaling Up Nutrition Civil Society Network

Justification: The Ethiopia Civil Society Coalition for Scaling up Nutrition (ECSC-SUN) has media sensitisation as one of its priorities, in order to put nutrition higher up the public and political agenda. Despite the efforts made by ECSC-SUN to include nutrition in the media agenda, the communication material developed have not been used in the nutrition sector properly. To respond to this challenge, the Innovation Plan focuses on strengthening the capacities of journalists and editors to recognise and report evidence-based nutrition messages, with a specific focus on reaching pregnant women and lactating mothers.

Expected results: Nutrition becomes a higher priority for the media and formally recognised in media plans. Increased quantity and quality of nutrition-related messages reported by the media outside the health sector – for instance in reporting on agriculture, livestock and fisheries, energy, education, social inclusion and others. Targeted beneficiaries: 30 editors (multi-sectorial) and 13 media journalists (1 for each media outlet).

Innovation and intervention: ECSC-SUN’s objective focuses on creating awareness and creating demand for nutrition services (“right to food”) through the media. The innovation plan will strengthen the ongoing training of journalists and collaboration with various media houses at Regional level. ECSC-SUN will introduce an innovative ‘media award, which proved to be a powerful tool in other countries (e.g. Tanzania, Zambia) to catalyze the interest of the media and result in high-quality coverage relating to nutrition (eg 1,000 Days). This plan will encourage media houses to assign or delegate a correspondent who is trained and informed about key nutrition information and practices at the community level. This will improve the quality of nutrition messages covered by the media and increase their focus on child and maternal nutrition.