Accelerated Reduction Effort on Anaemia (AREA) Community of Practice Webinar: “Strengthening Food-based Approaches To Reduce Iron Deficiency”

In December 2017, the SPRING Accelerated Reduction Effort on Anaemia (AREA) Community of Practice held a webinar on how the FAO/WHO GIFT platform may strengthen food-based approaches to reduce iron deficiency. The full webinar recording is available online.

Iron deficiency is one of the primary causes of anemia, a condition that affects over 1.5 billion people globally. Policymakers who want to address iron deficiency anemia through a food-based approach need information on individual quantitative food consumption to estimate daily intake of iron by different subsets of a given population. The FAO/WHO GIFT platform offers food-based indicators derived from sex and age disaggregated data on individual food consumption, which may provide useful information to tackle iron deficiency anemia.

This AREA Community of Practice webinar featured a demonstration of the FAO/WHO GIFT tool and how to use its food-based indicators to specifically focus on iron deficiency anemia, based on the datasets currently available in the platform. Examples were given for different population groups, such as children and women in reproductive age.