This project is co-designing and evaluating society led interventions to improve community-based food production in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Its full title is Intervention Co-creation to Improve Community-based Food Production and Household Nutrition in Small Island Developing States, or ICoFaN for short.

Led by Prof Nigel Unwin (at the Universities of Exeter and Cambridge), ICoFaN is co-creating community based interventions to improve local food production and consumption. The project involves partners from two local non-governmental organisations, and colleagues at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji,  and the University of the West Indies in St Vincent and the Grenadines.

The design of the interventions will be informed by engagement with stakeholders to ‘map’ local food systems. Systematic reviews of the existing literature and data which has been collected from other sources will also be included. Using mixed methods, the project team will evaluate the impact of interventions on household nutrition and expenditure.

The work in Fiji and St Vincent builds upon research that was undertaken in those settings as part of the Community Food and Health Project.

Small island developing states (SIDS) have high burdens of malnutrition, and over the past 3 decades this has been exacerbated by an increasing reliance on food imports, the majority of which are of low nutritional quality.

SIDS governments have committed to increasing the local production and consumption of nutritious food as a way of increasing food security, sovereignty, and addressing the impacts of malnutrition.

New partners in ICoFaN are the Universite d’Etat d’Haiti and McGill University. In Haiti, new work will be undertaken to inform the development and pilot testing of an intervention designed to improve local food production and household nutrition. As in Fiji and St Vincent, the intervention design will be informed by evidence reviews and food system mapping with stakeholders from across the food chain.