National Information Platform for Nutrition (NIPN) is a project supported by the European Union and implemented by the Helen Keller International in partnership with Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), with active collaboration of Statistics and Informatics Division (SID)/BBS, Food Planning and Monitoring Unit (FPMU), Bangladesh National Nutrition Council (BNNC), Institute of Public Health and Nutrition (IPHN) and GED of Planning Commission. NIPN Bangladesh officially started its activities in the beginning of 2018 and is expected to run through the end of 2021.Now in its 4th year, NIPN’s basic mandate is to influence policy-making and policy implementation through capacity-building, and policy studies related to nutrition, and communicating the study results effectively to policy makers.

NIPN’s primary objective is to support governmental and civil society nutrition policy planners to strengthen capacity to monitor progress towards reduction of undernutrition and to help direct attention to more cost-effective and evidence-based policies to strengthen nutritional well-being of all citizens of this country. 

NIPN is trying to set up a functional and effective information and analysis platform through two major components: to formulate policy questions for analysis and undertaking analysis of already available data to feed the policy-making process. 

Achievement of NIPN: 

In its efforts to strengthen institutional and human capacity  for nutritional analysis, NIPN has conducted short term trainings, sent officials abroad for formal university degrees. And NIPN has prepared several reports and policy briefs which have examined the gaps in policy and knowledge and tried to fill those up in modest ways. NIPN has also started processes for sustainability of its action when the project ends. In brief, the following are some of the achievements of NIPN over the last 4 years or so. 

 5 GoB officials have been awarded; one-year Fellowship for Master Programme in European universities (2 from BBS,2 from BNNC, 1 from BIRTAN)

 9 short trainings have been conducted by NIPN for Govt. Ministries/ agency officials

 4 policy briefs have been published in BBS website 

 Following completed reports have been shared with all NIPN stakeholders 

 Report on Regional Dietary Divesrity

 Policy mapping report 

 Other reports which have just been completed or at different stages of progress include

Systematic Review of Impact of Nutritional Interventions

Household Food Production and Nutrition

Impact of VGD/ICVGD on Nutrition

Role of Family Farming on Nutrition

Analysis of Nutritional Issues in Urban Bangladesh

One one-pager and 4 issues of a web-based Newsletter have also been published.

BBS is a major partner in daily activities of NIPN. For this a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Helen Keller Intl. and BBS in January 2019 which set the working modalities for BBS collaboration with NIPN. Another MoU is for data repository between Helen Keller Intl. with BBS in 21 June, 2021