Dave Little and Richard Newton participated in the kick-off meetings for the DANIDA funded ‘Climate resilient aquatic food systems for healthy lives of young women and girls in Bangladesh project’ aka the AQUAFOOD project.

This project builds on the success and outcomes of the Immana funded Aquatic Food for Health and Nutrition (AQN): A metric for assessing the impacts on nutrition and health of agroecosystems producing farmed seafood (MEFANIG). The metric was developed with a view to enable targeting nutrition advice to the most health vulnerable women in the same area of Bangladesh--the shrimp and prawn producing communities of Greater Khulna.

AQUAFOOD aims to support local capacity building through supporting five PhD opportunities registered at the two local Universities that are partners on the project; the Bangladesh Agricultural University and the Noakhali Science and Technology University. The key people in both these Prof Mahfujul ‘Ripon’ Haque and Dr Abdullah Al Mamun are both Stirling alumni . With support from the International public health research centre, icddrb, based in Dhaka, the University of Copenhagen that leads the project together with Universities of Stirling and Aberdeen the project aims to work at the intersection of aquatic food systems, public health and environment outcomes. A senior stakeholders meeting was held in Dhaka to present outcomes of MEFANIG and plans for AQUAFOOD and to process the thoughts and insights form the group into the implementation plan.

Aquaculture ponds on the route to Khulna

We then travelled to Khulna where we held a local stakeholder workshop with public health and fisheries promoters and representatives of women with young children, adolescent girls and farmers. Theis was excellent preparation for developing a detailed implementation plan around the submitted and approved proposal which we spent the next two days on. Altogether a very productive visit!