The Nutrition Visualizer is a new tool to visualize the pathways by which programs impact nutrition. It is both a conceptual framework and a repository of evidence for “what works” in nutrition programming.
The framework includes topics relating to the health system, WASH, food and agriculture, education, and social protection. It captures both “upstream” and “downstream” factors, highlighting the activities that increase coverage of nutrition interventions, and how those interventions, in turn, affect population outcomes.
Users can interact with the visual framework, isolate pathways for specific interventions, and click on boxes and arrows to see current evidence and indicators.
We built the Nutrition Visualizer to support governments, donors, and NGOs working in low- and middle-income countries to design and implement evidenced-based nutrition programs. We hope researchers and technical experts also find the tool useful as a mechanism to identify research gaps and build consensus around the impact pathways needed to improve nutrition.
Use the Nutrition Visualizer for:
The Nutrition Visualizer is built as a highly detailed framework that includes 240 boxes and 398 arrows. Rather than present all the boxes and arrows together (which would be overwhelming!) the tool allows users to view the framework at different levels of detail. Users can reduce or morph the full framework to create smaller, program-specific logic models or theories of change.
We think of the conceptual framework as an update to the UNICEF framework for malnutrition, initially developed in 1992, that continues to be the basis of many nutrition programs. The framework in the Nutrition Visualizer is more explicitly multi-sectoral and includes more detail on upstream components.
In developing the Nutrition Visualizer, we catalogued 466 peer-reviewed journal articles on the implementation and effectiveness of nutrition interventions. We used that literature to create the framework itself, and then built the evidence into the tool, so that as users interact with the framework they can click to see the available evidence for each box and arrow. We think this is a fantastic way to browse the evidence for nutrition programming.
As we continue to work on the Nutrition Visualizer, we hope to add more evidence into the tool, to further support or refute the underlying impact pathways.
The Nutrition Visualizer is being developed by a team at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in collaboration with experts and academics at other institutions.
We are currently undertaking a nine-month review process to validate the conceptual framework and the pathways contained within it. Likewise, the web-based tool is still a “beta” version. We plan to launch the Nutrition Visualizer officially in mid-2020.
If you or your colleagues are interested in contributing to the Nutrition Visualizer, please email Tim Roberton at timroberton@jhu.edu.