Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps her Department is taking to improve the reliability and collection of data on nutrition in countries in Asia and Africa.

DFID has been taking a range of steps to improve the reliability and collection of data on nutrition. These include organising an informal expert consultation on nutrition data gaps in June this year; working with the European Commission to establish National Information Platforms for Nutrition; developing innovative metrics and methods for agriculture for nutrition; continuing to fund the Global Nutrition Report, which gives particular focus to data quality and availability and continues to undertake analysis to identify priority areas for investment; funding the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) programme; and continuing to work with other donors to coordinate our funding on nutrition.

In addition, the UK and US jointly announced that they will partner with the GODAN Secretariat to organise a 2016 GODAN Summit. We will also commission research in early 2016 to test innovative and feasible approaches to collect data, with sufficient frequency in more fragile settings, which should enable better management of malnutrition when shocks and disasters arise.

The UK will continue to provide strong leadership to maintain global momentum on nutrition and will continue to work hard to deliver its promises to scale up its work on nutrition between now and 2020.