Today we profile Denise Lionetti, the deputy director of PATH’s Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition (MCHN) program.
Q. What makes you so passionate about nutrition?
In general, maternal and child health get a lot of focus, and rightfully so. But since nutrition is one of the building blocks of health, it can get lumped in with everything else, and it becomes almost secondary.
Nutrition is key to every health area that PATH works in, and malnutrition is an underlying cause of many diseases. Nutrition must be integrated into every phase of health care, from pre- and postnatal care to childhood, adolescent, and adult care. PATH’s work in nutrition focuses on integrating nutrition into other programs and helping to bring the work to scale.
Q. What are some ways PATH helps integrate nutrition into other programs and then brings them to scale?
We have a variety of programs that help us reach those goals. One is our Scaling Up Nutrition (MQSUN) project, funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) in the United Kingdom.
DFID asked us to develop a strategy to make it more possible to integrate nutrition into other sectors, such as poverty alleviation, agriculture, education, and health. We’re partnering with DFID to provide technical assistance while working with local governments to implement that strategy. This includes remote support and in-country work in more than 30 countries—predominately in Africa—and also large efforts in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Yemen.
Q. You mentioned a focus on country governments. Can you tell us more?
The MQSUN project is a very successful mechanism for working with countries, because we don’t come in with our own agenda. It is truly driven by the needs of each country. We want to help them with any barriers they face to integrating nutrition into all the other areas.
One barrier is workforce planning. There is always a shortage of trained nutritionists. We help them plan for the future by building local capacity. We find in-country consultants and team members to help grow that capacity. We are always thinking, “How can countries do this on their own?” Through MQSUN, we are seeing that more donors and countries see the value in approaching nutrition work in a fully integrated way.
This profile originally ran in Spotlight, PATH’s internal newsletter.
More information
- Our work in Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition.
- Improving Nutrition Programming Worldwide: Maximising the Quality of Scaling Up Nutrition (MQSUN).
- Our work on the Mama Sweetpotato Action for Security and Health in Africa (Mama SASHA) project and the Infant and Young Child Nutrition (IYCN) project.