Development of NutVal 4

Project Summary

Design of food rations that meet internationally agreed standards is a prerequisite for the design of effective, safe and cost-effective nutritional programmes.  However, the manual calculation of nutrient content can be extremely time consuming and prone to error.

NutVal is an Excel spreadsheet application used by UN and NGO agencies for the calculation of the nutrient content of food assistance programmes.  First developed by UNHCR in the 1990s, it has subsequently been updated by IGH in work funded by a series of small grants from WFP, UNHCR, UCL Futures, and the IASC Global Nutrition Cluster.

This project is upgrading the application to include an expansion of the number of food items and range of nutrient data, improve age group selection options, and enhance data storage and graphing.  In addition to this additional functionality, the energy and micronutrient requirement targets used in NutVal have been updated to take into account the most recent recommendations by WHO, FAO, and the Sphere Project.

Key Project Information

Dates: 14 Feb 2012 - 1 Sept 2013

Principal Investigator: Dr Andrew Seal

Partner: Emergency Nutrition Network

Location: Global/regional

Funding: USAID Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance

Contact: a.seal@ucl.ac.uk

Website: www.nutval.net/

Resources

Training presentation on using NutVal