Purpose of this Compendium

The purpose of the Compendium on Good Practices in Health and Nutrition is to provide insights into the factors that promote equity in the intersection between the food environment, and health and nutrition, and how enablers can be harnessed and barriers overcome. By exploring a series of case studies, lessons are shared that settings of all sizes and at all stages of development can learn from as they strive for healthy, nutritious and sustainable food environments.

By “good practice” we mean an exemplary intervention that through experience in a real life setting has proven to reliably achieve results in terms of evidence, ethics and equity as well as effectiveness and efficiency related to process and outcomes. Such good practice interventions may be contextualized and scaled up so as to benefit more people. This process of expansion and scaling up of successfully tested good practices requires strategic planning. Disseminating knowledge of such interventions around the world supports technical staff in acquiring knowledge on how to improve and adapt strategies and activities through feedback, reflection and analysis on what works, what does not work and why some elements do not work.

Who this Compendium is for:

Technical staff searching for the tools to implement food environment interventions that improve the health and nutrition equity of their communities.

Criteria for how we identified good practice interventions:

Two researchers in nutrition equity examined each intervention according to WHO four core criteria and additional criteria:

  1. Effectiveness: Intervention achieves results that are measurable
  2. Efficiency: Intervention produces results with a reasonable level of resources and time
  3. Relevance: Intervention targets the intersection between the food environment, and health and nutrition
  4. Ethical soundness: Intervention respects the current rules of ethics for dealing with human populations
  5. Equity-focus: Intervention addressed differences that are unfair, unjust as a main or sub- component of the intervention

One or more additional criteria:

  • sustainability
  • possibility of duplication
  • involvement of partnerships
  • community involvement
  • political commitment