Food Aid Quality Review Phase III: Quarterly Technical Report No. 7

Government's humanitarian agenda. The project's goal is to enable government-wide actions and public-private engagement around food aid to achieve greater cost-effectiveness for decades to come. FAQR is planned to continue through January 2019. Evidence generation is a key objective of FAQR, which involves identifying packaging solutions to optimize product integrity and reduce costs along the supply chain. The project is generating new field-based evidence to support cost-effective use of products. FAQR is also developing tools to support cost-effective product and programming choices to make the best use of taxpayer dollars. Industry standards are another area of focus for FAQR, which is working with food industry partners to incorporate industry standards into the food aid agenda. This includes enhancing food safety and quality standards. The FAQR team has advanced the objective of promoting industry standards through an evaluation of the USAID/FFP Program Operations Division (POD) Food Safety and Quality Feedback Loop and Questionnaire. In the fourth quarter of Fiscal Year 2017, the FAQR team contributed to building evidence on food aid effectiveness through two landscape scans. The first scan examines gaps in existing knowledge on how food aid affects nutrition, while the second scan examines research methods used by published and ongoing studies focused on food aid products. New evidence is also being generated in Sierra Leone through FAQR's research on the nature of "recovery from MAM." The FAQR team is also promoting industry standards through an evaluation of the USAID/FFP Program Operations Division (POD) Food Safety and Quality Feedback Loop and Questionnaire. The results revealed that there would be large efficiency gains if the feedback system provided real-time incident reporting and stored data to allow for monitoring of trends. Upcoming activities in Fiscal Year 2018, Quarter 1, October-December 2017, include hosting two symposia at the 2017 International Congress of Nutrition (ICN). The first symposium will share advances and challenges in food aid research, informing new paradigms of food aid products and programs. The second symposium will promote the discussion of advances and challenges in research on the frontier of child malnutrition, inform new approaches to food-based solutions and measures of success, and share current and planned research. FAQR is also developing a product supply chain optimization model and tool based on the current operations of the USAID/FFP supply chain. The FAQR team will share the tool with FFP, which will promote more effective decision-making in the procurement process. Additionally, ongoing supply chain optimization work will focus on identifying choke points across the system and estimating the magnitude of efficiency gains if the bottlenecks could be resolved through better advance planning. A key component of the FAQR research ongoing in Sierra Leone is the assessment of a food aid-focused Social Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) campaign. During this coming quarter, the roll-out of the SBCC component will be completed, including the integration of counseling cards focused on the key messages surrounding food aid preparation and use. The FAQR team is fully documenting and testing the process they have used to develop this campaign, as one of the main recommendations for effective supplementary feeding programs is to prioritize messaging and behavior change surrounding food aid interventions. FAQR reports and manuscripts published in Quarter 4 of 2017 include "Programme News: Tufts University-based Food Aid Quality Review activities" in UNSCN News 42—A Spotlight on the Nutritional Challenges of the 21st Century.