Kalibata, Baker, Kadiyala to keynote at ANH Academy 2016

NaijaAgroNet:

The President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and former Rwandan Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources, Dr. Agnes Kalibata, would be joined by the Director of Nutrition at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Shawn Baker, and Haris Gazdar, Senior Researcher at the Collective for Social Science Research as well as the Principal Investigator for the IMMANA, Dr. Suneetha Kadiyala, to give keynotes at the inaugural Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health (ANH) Academy Week, in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, reports NaijaAgroNet

The Academy Week events, NaijaAgroNet gathered would commence today, Monday, June 20, with a two-day training sessions tagged Learning Labs and which cover a broad selection of impact measurement methods and skills, as well as sessions focusing on interdisciplinary research, gender-sensitive interventions and getting published, among others.

The Learning Labs, as explained by the organiser’s Research and Knowledge Uptake Manager, Innovative Methods and Metrics for Agriculture and Nutrition Actions (IMMANA) Mr. Joe Yates are followed by a three-day Scientific Conference on Agri-Health Research.

Expected speakers, he said, would deliver oral and poster presentations around six major themes, namely Agriculture and Nutrition Linkages; Agriculture and Sustainable Diets; Health Impacts of Animal Sourced Foods; Women, Households and Nutrition; Markets, Value Chains and Nutrition; Determinants of Diets and Nutrition.

He quoted the Dr. Suneetha Kadiyala, Senior Lecturer in Nutrition-Sensitive Development at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Principal Investigator for the IMMANA as saying that to achieve the goals of overcoming further 165 million children from suffering stunted growth, there is need to understand the interactions between agriculture-food systems and nutrition and health, so as to have tools that allow stakeholders to predict the effects of agricultural-food system change and innovation on health and nutrition outcomes. 

“This requires collaboration across disciplines and sectors, recognition of which is reflected in the objectives of the ANH Academy,” Kadiyala said, declaring that his team is really inspired by the interest and initiative shown by the scientific community in the ANH Academy Week. 

Institutions from over 20 countries and a wide range of discipline, he said, would be represented at these events, reflecting the complex challenges facing us and the collaborations required to tackle these headlong.’   

He pointed out that the ANH Academy Week expands on the successful history of the five LCIRAH conferences, as well as events and activities by A4NH, and is part of one of three workstreams of IMMANA.

Remmy Nweke/ED, Ops

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