Technical Assistance to Strengthen Capabilities (TASC) project

We were part of a TASC consortium that contributed to improved nutritional outcomes as part of the Technical Assistance for Nutrition (TAN) programme, funded by UK Aid.

Our brief

TASC provided technical assistance to the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement and to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and was led by DAI, with NutritionWorks and Development Initiatives (DI) as consortium partners. The project ran until July 2023 and was a follow-on to the Maximising the Quality of Scaling Up Nutrition Plus (MQSUN+) programme.

TASC provided demand-driven technical assistance services in two components:

• Component 1: Assistance to governments in the SUN Movement and the SUN Movement Secretariat to improve efforts to scale up nutrition impact.
• Component 2: Assistance to the FCDO Nutrition Policy Unit and country offices to maximise the quality and effectiveness of their nutrition-related policy and programmes, to support evidence generation and lesson learning and to develop nutrition capacity.

DI sat on the Senior Partner Group to offer expertise on data analysis of finance for nutrition and to contribute to the planning and implementation of projects in response to demand-driven requests received from the FCDO and SUN Movement.

What we delivered

We delivered several projects through TASC.

Continuing on from our work under MQSUN+, we supported the FCDO to identify, quantify and understand its official development assistance (ODA) spending on nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive programmes, as well as its performance against pre-existing commitments. You can download our latest PDF report on this scoring: FCDO's aid spending on nutrition: 2021. This most recent report contains new analysis looking at the link between FCDO’s climate and nutrition-related spending.

Also carrying on from MQSUN+, we led a team of TASC experts to carry out the next round of SUN country budget analysis for governments who request technical assistance through the SUN Movement. We used a budget analysis toolkit developed under MQSUN+ to assess, analyse nutritional finances and train government officials on how to conduct the analysis themselves.

We also led the initial scoping and planning of a user-friendly, country-specific, nutrition-focused costing tool that built on the MQSUN+ toolkit for multisectoral planning.

Further, we contributed to the development of a monthly information resource for the FCDO on the global indirect impacts of Covid-19 on nutrition. Our role within a wider TASC team was to search for data sources and draft information summaries into a digestible and useful resource.

Finally, we assisted FCDO and World Health Organization with the Initiative on Climate Action and Nutrition (I-CAN), helping draft key messages and aiding the development of baseline data for one of the I-CAN outcomes.

Results

Our work with the FCDO allowed them to meet any reporting requirements, such as for the Global Nutrition Report, and will help the FCDO track against any spending commitments, such as those assumed at Nutrition for Growth events. It will also support the FCDO to track their nutrition funding internally and externally, and ultimately improve the transparency and accountability of their nutrition portfolio.

Our work with the SUN Movement will build the capacity of SUN member countries to track their finances for nutrition. It provides them with a regular review of financial data to help decision-makers prioritise, plan, monitor and evaluate the implementation of their national nutrition policies.