National Nutrition Planning Guidelines for Uganda 2015.

These guidelines, aligned with existing Uganda national development policy and planning frameworks as well as international obligations relevant to food and nutrition security, are intended as a tool to integrate nutrition as a cross-cutting issue in other plans. They represent a multisectoral guidance for those involved in planning for nutrition activities at both national and decentralized level and complement the Local Government Development Planning Guidelines (LGDPG) of 2014 and the Sector Development Planning Guidelines (SDPG) of 2015, developed by the National Planning Authority (NPA).
At all levels, planning for nutrition should be anchored on the following principles (i) Evidence based; (ii) Participatory; (iii) Human rights based; (iv) Focus on the most vulnerable groups; (v) Gender equality; (vi) Harmonization with national policies and planning frameworks; (vii) Accountability and transparency; (viii) Multisectoral and integrated planning; (ix) Inter-sectoral coordination; and (x) Feasibility.
The document identifies 8 main steps in the planning process (preparing to plan; situation analysis and identification of needs; description of development goals, objectives, and strategies; identification of sector interventions and activities to plan for; integration of plans from other institutions; monitoring and evaluation; identification of resource requirements; and plan approval and submission) and for each step includes the nutrition considerations that should be kept in mind when preparing the policies. Particularly, an effective means to improve nutrition is to incorporate food consumption and nutrition objectives in mainstream policies and projects that support the country’s development process. For most sectors, this calls for moving from nutrition-neutral goals, objectives, and strategies to those that are nutrition-specific (the ones that address the immediate causes of under-nutrition and some of the underlying causes) or nutrition-sensitive (the ones that address some of the basic causes of malnutrition and incorporate nutrition goals and actions from a wide range of sectors, such as primary and secondary education for girls, maternal mental health, support for women’s economic activities, water, sanitation and hygiene). In addition to this, work multisectorally also means that the different sectors coordinate and work together to produce commonly desired outcomes.
In Annex 1 are listed the main critical linkages between different sectors and nutrition, namely a. health (many common diseases are directly or indirectly caused or aggravated by quantitatively and qualitatively inadequate nutrition); b. agriculture (improved production and consumption of nutrient-dense crops and livestock can improve overall diet quality, and increased income from agriculture provides access to improved quality and quantity of food); c. education (people with higher levels of education tend to have better health outcomes, girls enrolled in school are more likely to delay their first pregnancy leading to better nutritional outcomes for mother and infant, and school feeding issues); d. trade and industry (affecting food prices); e. gender and social development (malnutrition can lead to reduced income and increased vulnerability to shocks and crises); f. water and sanitation (possible reduction of diseases and other related conditions that cause malnutrition); and g. local Government (coordination is essential, and local governments provide the appropriate structures to do this).