WHAT WE DO
The Malnutrition Determinants Conceptual Framework has guided OH’s programming design and implementation over the last decades to help understand and address nutrition outcomes through their determinants.
HOW THE PHASES WORK
Phase 1
The Assessment Phase identifies barriers to nutritious diets in communities. This information helps design effective interventions for food security. By monitoring nutritional status, we can track the effectiveness of our interventions and ensure they have a lasting impact.
Phase 2
Operation Hunger provides immediate food relief to combat malnutrition. Their approach varies, including soup kitchens, household distributions, and food parcels. While relief is not a long-term solution, it’s a crucial short-term step towards sustainability.
Phase 3
The projects empower communities to become self-sufficient, addressing malnutrition and food insecurity. They provide skills training and job opportunities for income generation, improved health, and positive behaviours, leading to long-term solutions.
Phase 4
The education programmes equip communities with the skills to become self-sufficient in ensuring food security and health. They provide training in specific areas, such as surveys and project management, enabling communities to independently coordinate and sustain their initiatives.
Phase 5
The Assessment Phase identifies barriers to nutritious diets in communities. This information helps design effective interventions for food security. By monitoring nutritional status, we can track the effectiveness of our interventions and ensure they have a lasting impact.
FRAMEWORK DEFINITION
Everyone deserves access to healthy, affordable food and quality nutrition care. This access is hindered by deeper inequities that arise from unjust systems and processes that shape everyday living conditions. The framework acknowledges that nutrition outcomes are influenced by the way people’s everyday social, psychological/behavioural, and material circumstances interact with their wider environments. Understanding this, OH—through its programme interventions and high-quality, in-depth analysis—works to disentangle these patterns, identify barriers and opportunities, and build measurable solutions that drive long-lasting, impactful action to ensure that no one is left behind.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE FRAMEWORK
Highlight 1
It acknowledges the evolving face of malnutrition, which presents as a triple burden: undernutrition (including stunting and wasting); deficiencies in essential vitamins and other micronutrients; and overweight and obesity. These forms of malnutrition, which often coexist, are driven by poor diets, inadequate care practices, and insufficient health services.
Highlight 2
It presents a holistic narrative of the factors that contribute to good nutrition, offering conceptual clarity on the enabling, underlying, and immediate determinants of adequate nutrition. It highlights their vertical and horizontal interconnectedness, as well as the positive outcomes of improved nutrition—such as enhanced survival, growth, development, performance, and economic well-being.
Highlight 3
Guides programme-specific interventions by identifying cost drivers, resource requirements, and developmental priorities.
OH PHASE 5
IMPLEMENTATION MODEL
The evolving nature of child malnutrition requires a systems-integrated response—one that delivers diets, services, and practices to support good nutrition at every stage of life, while fostering nutrition-responsive development for all children, adolescents, women, and men. This approach acknowledges the central role of the food system, working in tandem with health, water and sanitation, education, and social protection systems, to provide nutritious, safe, affordable, and sustainable diets for children, adolescents, and women, while ensuring adequate nutrition services and positive nutrition practices throughout the life cycle.
Benefit 1
End hunger—achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
Benefit 2
Good health and well-being—ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.
Benefit 3
Gender equality—achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
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