المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

Dear FNS Forum team members,

First learn from the practices of colleagues in your organization(FAO)

I would like to advise your team to learn from the practices of your FAO colleagues if you want to understand the degree to which the FSN information produced is actually used by decision makers, and influences policy making. I believe the information would be useful to many FAO staffs who have very low level of knowledge about many problems in developing countries but have been working as experts to prepare many policy reports about the countries. I read many policy guideline documents prepared by FAO staffs and most postings on the FSN Forum. The information shared in the forum were very useful to make the policy documents practical and useful but the information are poorly used. For instance, some members in the FSN explained the nutritional issue of the indigenous people as a critical agenda but the FAO staffs ignored the vital issue when preparing on the zero draft of the Framework for Action (FFA).  FAO members are supposed to adopt the information and demonstrate to others that the information are useful. If the FAO staffs do little trust and follow the information of the FSN forum what do you expect from others?    

One problem to be the information or Knowledge actually used in policy making processes. 

If policy decision makers requires to prepare policy documents themselves they would explore interesting issues, experiences and other information. But in some countries, consultants of funding agencies, particularly institutionally weak aid dependent countries (e.g.Nepal),  prepare most of the documents and send to the decision makers on email or by curriers. The decision makers require to read and sign the documents but do little exercise. The consultants work with personal relationship with staffs of the funding agencies, and do little value and read the information shared in the FSN forum. These are the reasons the policy documents of funding agencies supported agencies find highly formal but impractical. 

Thanks for reading my responses on your queries.

Bhubaneswor Dhakal