National Nutrition Strategy to 2025 and Plan of Action 2016-2020.

This 2016-2020 National Nutrition Strategy (NNS) has been improved based on the experiences, opportunities, obligations, and important participation of multiple domestic sectors and development partners and thanks to international interest in providing support and acts as means of adopting the policies and strategies of the long-term National Socio-Economic Development Plan (NSEDP) of the government of the Lao PDR. This NNS is a tool for all sectors related to nutrition and food security (NFS) and is to be used over a ten-year timeframe up until 2025. The National Plan of Action on Nutrition (NPAN) is to run for a five-year period and emphasizes the same kinds of implementation – using a multi-sectoral convergent approach with common goals, and timeframes while boosting resources and increasing support from development partners and the relevant stakeholders to the greatest extent possible to reduce all forms of malnutrition among women, children and disadvantaged groups, to achieve success, and meet the set targets.
Its strategic objectives are: to tackle the immediate causes at the level of the individual and focus on achieving sufficient food consumption and safety, emphasizing the first 1,000 days of life and reducing the prevalence of diseases caused by contaminated food and indirectly transmitted infectious diseases which impair the body’s ability to absorb food consumed; and to tackle the underlying causes (mostly at household and community levels), which requires improvements to the safety and diversity of food consumed so that people may have access to food at all times and locations, and moreover, to focus on improving maternal and child health (MCH) practices, clean water and sanitation and healthy environments and access to health services. The strategies aimed at tackling the fundamental causes have been specified to comprise capacity building at institutional level and improving coordination, human resource development, the quantitative and qualitative improvement of information, promotion for investment into nutrition interventions, and increased food security. These strategies also emphasize the socio-culturally embedded causes of malnutrition and specify interventions which relate to many areas and the creation of broader national strategies in order to focus on ensuring rights and equality concerning access to nutritional natural resources. These strategies also explain the necessary and related policies of each sector which affects malnutrition.
The NNS to 2025 consists of five parts – Part 1: Preamble, which gives an overall explanation of nutrition and the NNS; Part 2: Nutrition and Food Situation, which explains the importance of the problems arising from and main causes of malnutrition in the Lao PDR; Part 3: Vision, Mission, Overall Goal, and Guiding Principles, which explains the NFS targets; Part 4: NNS Framework and Priority Areas for Solutions to Nutrition, which specifies concrete focus points to tackle the immediate, underlying, and basic causes of malnutrition; and Part 5, which gives a general presentation on the mobilization of funding, resource allocation, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation (M&E). This NNS shall promote gender roles, placing emphasis on women’s access to health services, to NFS information, and to food. Women and girls shall receive an education and training and be enabled to earn an income and participate in household and community decision making on an equal basis with men (3.4.5).
This Strategic Direction emphasizes ensuring linkages with other stakeholders who affect the NFS interventions indirectly. The detailed plans and budgets shall be specified in the programs of the relevant sectors for each period. This Strategic Direction comprises land allocation improvement, energy and mines, water resources and the environment, climate change – natural disasters, telecommunications and transportation systems, human rights, gender roles, and poverty reduction. It also emphasizes MNCH and immunization, the integrated management of childhood illness (IMCI), the control of non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases and of communicable diseases, including diarrhea, malaria, dengue fever, ARI, tuberculosis, and the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMCT) and HIV/AIDS (4.4).