Together with the SUN Business Network (SBN) and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), ATNI has started to develop a voluntary self-assessment tool for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to review where they stand in terms of nutritional policies and practices. At ATNI we believe that SMEs also have an important role to play in making nutritious food accessible and affordable to consumers. The tool will be piloted in both Nigeria and Bangladesh across the next 3 years.

With the tool, businesses will be able to assess their performance in increasing the availability and affordability of food and beverage products with high nutritional quality. An online platform will be used for data collection to automate recommendations, generate a scoring and inform companies on how to improve their performances on nutrition to the benefit of consumers at a country level.

Along with piloting the tool, various elements of capacity building are incorporated into the project for the companies who decide to participate. The project started with country visits, where ATNI was able to do stakeholder consultations, and in turn understand the business environment for SMEs in the food and beverage sector in both Nigeria and Bangladesh, as well as identify companies that are interested in participating in the pilot phase of the tool.

In June, ATNI held roundtables with CSOs, policymakers, and companies in Nigeria and in August, ATNI repeated the same roundtables in Bangladesh, pictures from this trip can be seen below. The roundtables were co-organized with GAIN and the local SBN networks. ATNI is aiming to develop the tool by the end of this year and start the pilot phase in January 2020. If you are interested in learning more about the project please contact ATNI’s program coordinator Efi Chatzinikolaou: efi.chatzinikolaou@accesstonutrition.org.