Tanzania PROFILES Slide Presentation.

TANZANIA FOOD AND NUTRITION CENTRE in collaboration with various ministries and collaborating agents such as the Academy for Educational Development (AED), UNICEF and WHO, developed PROFILES for nutrition in Tanzania for the purpose of enhancing advocating the benefits occurring from investing in nutrition. The advantage of using PROFILES include its ability to demonstrate the contribution that improved nutrition can make to human and economic development in the community as well as translating technical nutrition information/data in terms of arguments that make sense to non nutrition experts. Also PROFILES is able to estimate the costs, effectiveness, and benefits of nutrition programs which are used to set priorities for effective resource allocation.

Although PROFILES is primary an advocacy tool, it can also be used by nutrition and public health experts to facilitate the design of new programs. The framework provided by PROFILES encourages program planners to examine potential payoffs of alternative program approaches. PROFILES contains relationships that links nutritional problems to different functional consequences and possible interventions, the problems that PROFILES is currently designed to analyze includes:

• Protein energy malnutrition

• Sub optimal breastfeeding

• Maternal malnutrition

• Vitamin A deficiency

• Iodine deficiency

• Iron deficiency anaemia

PROFILES uses nutritional, demographic, economic, and others data and their relationships from scientific literature to quantify the impact of these nutritional problems on human performance, health, fertility and survival. The model can be modified to include specific data for a particular country where it is used.

The intention to use PROFILES for conducting nutrition advocacy in Tanzania emerges from the recent experience which clearly demonstrates that good nutrition can make significant contributions to both human and economic development. However, investments in nutrition programs have lagged behind other investments because:

• Nutrition has been considered an outcome from rather than an input to development.

• Nutrition programs have been viewed as less cost effective than competing investments.

It is now possible to quantify these relationships with greater accuracy, for example PROFILES shows that if no intervention to reduce low birth weight over the next 10 years is adopted, Tanzania will loose Tshs. 2,054 billion in productivity. It also shows that  the cost of malnutrition to workers productivity due to mental impairment arising from iodine deficiency amounts to Tshs. 1,397 billion, Tshs. 2,469 billion due to stunting and Tshs. 29 billion due to iron deficiency anaemia.

PROFILES further shows productivity gains that can be realized if by the year 2015 the country will achieve the targets of virtually elimination of iron deficiency, reduction of both severe and moderate stunting by half, reduction of anaemia in women by a third  and a reduction of low birth weight by a half.

The potential productivity gains by the year 2015 will be Tshs. 638 billion from reduction of iodine deficiency, Tshs. 288 billion from reduction of iron deficiency anaemia, Tshs. 634 billion from reduction of stunting and Tshs. 465 billion from reduction of low birth weight. This is a total of Tshs. 2,024 billion in present value gained over ten years.

The PROFILES has been presented in different forums including internal seminar (TFNC) and USAID. In May 2007, TFNC organized the National Nutrition Conference where by a paper entitled PROFILES IN TANZANIA: INVEST NOW FOR THE YEAR 2025 was presented. The big challenge posed for TFNC is for the PROFILES to be presented to policy makers at all levels beginning with Members of Parliament.

All forums recommended the improvement of the text in terms of using current available data so that PROFILES provides strong evidence based messages on the need for investing in nutrition.

Tanzania PROFILES Slide Presentation.