Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics Food Security Group

The rapid rise of obesity is a new challenge for developing countries and has important health and economic consequences. The objective of the Marketplace for Nutritious Foods (MNF) – run by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) –  is to increase the capacity and willingness of consumers, especially low-income consumers, to acquire and consume more nutritious foods.

Photo: Market vendors serving traditional prepared food away from home

MNF focuses on different ways to increase the availability of nutritious foods and promote their consumption in developing countries. The evaluation of MNF will collect new data in Kenya. The scientific team made of researchers from the US and Africa brings years of expertise on this topic. The consortium is led by Michigan State University (MSU) Food Security Group with partners from the University of Michigan School of Public Health and from Innovations for Poverty Action - Kenya (IPA-K).

“This multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional team came together extremely well to produce a top flight proposal” says David Tschirley, Professor of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics (AFRE) and co-Director of the Food Security Group at MSU, who serves as lead Principal Investigator on the MNF evaluation.

This team has years of expertise in researching food security and diet transformation in developing countries, in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. Tschirley is enthusiastic about this award, remarking that “it is a great opportunity for FSG, as it recognizes the work that our group has done on changing food systems and diets in Africa, and explicitly encourages us to push the frontier on research regarding changing food environments, which can be thought of as the food system as actually experienced by individual consumers. This is now the cutting edge of research on how the profound changes taking place in African economies are affecting food choice and nutritional outcomes.”

This evaluation is funded by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, for an approximate value of $1.2m over two and a half years, starting in July of 2018.

Related publications

David L Tschirley, Jason Snyder, Michael Dolislager, Thomas Reardon, Steven Haggblade, Joseph Goeb, Lulama Traub, and Francis Ejobi. 2015. Africa’s Unfolding Diet Transformation: Implications for Agrifood System Employment, Journal of Agribusiness in Developing and Emerging Economies, 2015, Vol. 5 Iss: 2, pp. 102–136.

Tschirley David, Thomas Reardon, Michael Dolislager, and Jason Snyder. 2015. The Rise of a Middle Class in East and Southern Africa: Implications for Food System Transformation. Journal of International Development, J. Int. Dev. 27, 2015, 628–646