Nutrition Learning Adventure – 2016 Legacy
Author: Kenaw Gebreselassie, Communication and Research Uptake Manager (Transform Nutrition) and Coordinator (ECSC-SUN) at Save the Children
We said good bye to 2016, and welcomed 2017. We are just a month away from ‘Last Year’, but we call it ‘last year’ this fast.
2016 saw several nutrition events and activities globally and locally – some grand and high level and some lesser one, but important; some global level and some national. From the Copenhagen Women Deliver conference, where against my expectation, nutrition was one of the key deliberations to the recently hosted Micronutrients Global Conference in Mexico; from the Transform Nutrition seminar in Ethiopia to the Ethiopia Civil Society Coalition for Scaling up Nutrition (ECSC-SUN) led nutrition learning forum, numerous nutrition related happenings came to pass here and there, close and far. All directed towards reducing malnutrition in its all forms.
As the year advanced to come to an end, during last three-two months in particular, many of us got rushed off our feet as we toiled to wrap up planned (nutrition) activities for the year, get them done well and their budgets utilized efficiently. We bustled around day in and day out to close projects that had to be phased out, to have accomplishments monitored and lessons documented.
A lot more had been taking place. Amidst of all these happened the Scaling up Nutrition Civil Society Network (SUN CSN) International Learning exchange, an outstandingly organized and impressively facilitated cross-learning event hosted regionally in Rwanda.
Learning exchanges do happen everywhere so often and we know some of them. The Learning Route that was organized by SUN CSN was uniquely different for me in terms of its objective, plan of action, selection of experiences that were shared, sites visited, innovation ideas generated, lessons learnt and of overall organization.
The event brought together several delegates of SUN CSO Alliances from 9 African countries with high malnutrition burden in a platform where diverse but entirely nutrition focused knowledge and experiences were shared. If the Learning Route was a movie, I would call it ‘Nutrition Learning Adventure’. When asked, this was how I summed up it. By adventure I meant – crossing and passing by small and beautiful hills of Rwanda, we traveled to the districts, flooded with the warmest welcome by the community and got shared impressive experiences of grass-root nutrition activities, community level efforts as well as high level commitments and accountability of the Rwandan government to tackle malnutrition. It was a journey full of take-home lessons.
2016 has gone. But the lessons we have gained, the changes we have witnessed, best practices and evidences we have (been) shared will transcend adding more energy to move forward until we end malnutrition. Memories of the events will still be very fresh and have the capacity to make us energized and committed for more positive changes we wish to see in what currently are high malnutrition burden countries. They will indeed make us aspire and demand more in this New Year and years to come.
Finally, may I salute all the host, organizers and facilitators of the Learning Route and wish you a very fruitful, veg-ful, meat-ful, milk-ful, crop-ful, (soda less-full year) year.
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