Want is social marketing? We can teach you.

What is social marketing?
Social marketing combines concepts and techniques from social science and marketing to create programs designed to influence human behavior to benefit society and individuals. It is considered a professional craft that relies on multiple scientific disciplines. Approaches that use social marketing have found success in public health, environmental protection, and political marketing. Here at Sight and Life, we believe social marketing has tremendous power to shift behaviors toward better nutrition, and we want to teach you all we know.

Scholarships Available

Sight and Life is hosting an open call for a chance to win a scholarship to a virtual SSPH+ Summer School course from August 23-28, 2021. The four selected winners will receive a scholarship to the three-day course 'Generating Demand for better public health goods and services: A systems and consumer-centered approach'. We welcome applicants to apply here by submitting an up-to-date C.V. along with an optional one-minute video creatively answering the question ‘How you would change the world to make it a better place?’.

This course is taught by Sight and Life experts:

Rowena Merrit, Senior Advisor on Consumer Insights and Social Marketing at Sight and Life
Breda Gavin-Smith, Global Public Health Nutrition Manager at Sight and Life
Kalpana Beesabathuni, Technology and Entrepreneurship at Sight and Life
Puja Peyden Tshering, Consumer Insights Specialist at Sight and Life

The engaging course will explore the following and more:

Explain the core elements of successful social marketing demand creation.
Learn how to “pitch” social marketing demand creation ideas and sustainable business models to senior management, stakeholders, and donors to gain buy-in.
Identify, prioritize and segment the target audience.
Discuss important issues related to public-private partnerships in trying to reach public health goals.
Understand why putting on your ‘business hat’ is important when thinking of improving nutrition and public health goods and services at scale.

The application deadline has been extended to Friday, July 16, 2021, at 23:58 EDT. Winners will be announced on Friday, July 23, 2021. Share the announcement easily on social media by visiting our Trello board. Can't wait to learn more? Please take a look at our social marketing and consumer insights resources here.

LEARN MORE

APPLY FOR A SCHOLARSHIP

Not only are food systems complex, but each is also unique to the geography and culture it is supposed to nourish.

Building Healthy, Nutritious and Affordable Food Systems for Rwanda through Innovations is a two-hour workshop that looks to discover the intricacies and needs to build effective and efficient food systems in Rwanda. We aspire to develop a Food Systems Innovation Hub that will support a positive food system transformation. As a UN Food Systems Summit Independent Dialogue, the ideas and information from this workshop will contribute to the upcoming Summit and further develop the Food Systems Innovation Hub concept in Rwanda.

Join us for an engaging event featuring:

Presentations by Anna Lartey (University of Ghana), Dr Ndabamenye Telesphore (Technical Advisor, Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources - Rwanda), and Breda Gavin-Smith (Sight and Life).
A dynamic conversation led by Kalpana Beesabathuni (Sight and Life) with Namukolo Covic (IFPRI) and more on the importance of innovating affordable, tasty, nutritious foods and how the Food Systems Innovation Hub could support entrepreneurs.
Simon Winter (Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture) and Maya Stewart (Lenzie Milling Company) will moderate insightful breakout sessions on entrepreneurship and innovation, creating demand for nutritious foods, food safety, sustainable proteins, advocacy and policy, and more.

The plenary presentations are open for all to attend; however, space is limited for the workshop, so please register early.

LEARN ABOUT THE FOOD SYSTEMS INNOVATION HUB

In April, Sight and LIfe led two Food Systems Summit Briefs published by the Scientific Group for the Food Systems Summit.

Food Systems Innovation Hubs in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
This paper aims to draw attention to the role Food Systems Innovation Hubs can play in creating healthy, resilient, and inclusive communities in LMICs. First, eight different archetypes of food innovation hubs are described. Future opportunities for these hubs to deliver planet-friendly nutritious and safe foods are then explored. It is argued that the complexity of food systems calls for context-specific transformations and that innovation hubs have a key role to play here.

Secondary Cities as Catalysts for Nutritious Diets in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
This paper discusses the challenge of the growing triple burden of malnutrition in urban contexts and advocates for the role of secondary cities as game-changers to transform city region food systems. Secondary cities are introduced as emerging players in pioneering nutrition-centered food systems interventions and monitoring and evaluating their impacts for later improvements and out-scaling.

Against the context of many of the challenges raised in this paper, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation has initiated and provides funding for a project starting in 2021, that aims to improve nutrition in secondary cities in three countries. The Nutrition in City Ecosystems (NICE) project works with selected secondary cities in Bangladesh (Dinajpur and Rangpur), Kenya (Bungomaand and Busia) and Rwanda (Rubavu and Rusizi) and places a particular focus on women, youth and vulnerable groups in city regions. Key elements of NICE are to: strengthen the supply of and demand for agroecologically-produced, local and nutritious foods; foster multisectoral governance; stimulate greater public and private sector engagement for resilient food systems and improved nutrition outcomes.

NICE is co-financed and implemented by a Swiss consortium comprised of the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich (Sustainable Agroecosystems & Food Processing Groups and World Food System Centre), Sight and Life, and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture.

Food Systems are Complex

To explain the links and importance of micronutrient nutrition within the food systems, check out this infographic that visually captures the intricacies from lab to plate. Learn more about food systems by diving into the open-access content from the Micronutrient Forum's CONNECTED Conference or read the Food Systems Track proceedings here.