Basic Needs

CEGA’s Basic Needs Initiative generates evidence on how to address food and nutrition insecurity, including the targeting and delivery of malnutrition prevention and treatment.

Motivation

Hunger and malnutrition are a widespread global concern. Wasting affects millions of children worldwide with severe, life-long consequences. Despite proven treatment, only ⅓ of children with severe malnutrition receive it. Nearly half of deaths among children under 5 years of age are linked to undernutrition. Due to conflict, economic instability, and weather shocks — the primary drivers of extreme hunger and malnutrition — the substantial gains achieved over the last two decades have plateaued. CEGA brings economics, data science, and public health expertise to test and refine innovative approaches to food and nutrition programming, delivery, and policy.

Key Areas of Focus

We build and leverage partnerships to generate insights and apply them to strengthen food and nutrition programming across three core research areas:

• Understanding household drivers for care. Family decisions, whether they seek care, maintain treatment, or adhere to clinical recommendations, have untested behavioral drivers and directly shape whether interventions succeed. That makes understanding household drivers, constraints, and priorities essential input for both program design and policy decisions.
• Strengthening delivery of proven treatment. Effective, low-cost solutions to malnutrition already exist — from Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) for treating wasting to multiple micronutrient supplementation (MMS) and vitamin A supplementation for prevention. We work to strengthen the programs delivering these interventions, testing what makes them more (cost-) effective and efficient.
• Reaching children and families in humanitarian and fragile settings. Household behavior and program delivery both shape whether malnutrition treatment reaches children, and nowhere is that more true — or more difficult — than in settings marked by crisis. Children living through armed conflict and forced displacement face especially severe rates of undernutrition. We leverage CEGA’s work in forced displacement to identify policies that improve food security outcomes for displaced children and people.