Community Food and Health

The Community Food and Nutrition Project (CFaH)

Developing theory and methods for evaluating the impact of community food initiatives on NCD risk, social and economic wellbeing, and the environment

The aim of this project is to develop a theoretical framework and methods for evaluating the impact of community-based food initiatives (CFPIs) on risk factors for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), social and economic wellbeing and the environment, in order to support the development of a multidisciplinary research programme in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

An ultimate goal in CFaH is to contribute to filling the evidence gaps in the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) on food quality, food sourcing, and food security in support of policy initiatives, and towards this we aimed to develop methods for evaluating the impacts of community-based food production initiatives and to use them to collect data to inform further work.

Our specific objectives were to:

• develop a toolkit of methods for assessing the relationships between diet, sources of food consumed, and the risk of nutrition related NCD; and
• to investigate associations between individual socio-demographic characteristics, food sources, and aspects of diet, including dietary diversity in two SIDS: Fiji and St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG).

Additionally, we considered the strengths and limitations of our methods and how to improve them for application in the evaluation of interventions aimed at increasing local food production and nutrition.

You can download our initial publication reporting survey results from St.Vincent and Fiji here.