The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is a Swiss-based foundation launched at the UN in 2002 to tackle the human suffering caused by malnutrition. Working with both governments and businesses, we aim to transform food systems so that they deliver more nutritious food for all people.
At GAIN, we believe that everyone in the world should have access to nutritious and safe food. We work to understand and deliver specific solutions to the daily challenge of food insecurity faced by poor people. By understanding that there is no “one-size-fits-all” model, we develop alliances and build tailored programmes, using a variety of flexible models and approaches.
We build alliances between governments, local and global businesses, and civil society to deliver sustainable improvements at scale. We are part of a global network of partners working together to create sustainable solutions to malnutrition. Through alliances, we provide technical, financial and policy support to key participants in the food system. We use specific learning, evidence of impact, and results of projects and programmes to shape and influence the actions of others.
Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, GAIN has representative offices in Denmark, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition, we have country offices in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Tanzania. Programmes and projects are carried out in a variety of other countries, particularly in Africa and Asia.
The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is issuing this Request for Proposal (RFP) and will be the administrative lead organisation for this RFP.
Low-quality diet, particularly processed food consumption, are the leading risk factor for poor health. Access to low-quality diets is becoming prevalent nowadays. Indonesian adolescents snack multiple times a day
(Blum et al, 2019) and regularly purchase pre-packaged snacks sold by street vendors, school canteens and kiosks.
GAIN’s ‘Food Investigator Game is a project that aims to involve adolescents through an interactive game to map out the source of nutritious foods and snacks in their local food environment. Supported with education, it aims to encourage adolescents to seek out healthier options, while at the same time signalling demand for healthier food to the vendors in the hope of triggering a market response.
The project will develop a game in collaboration with adolescents, that maps the food environment. It will encourage participants to input nutrition data from labels of packaged foods and snacks and instantly interpreting this information using front-of-package labels (FOPL).
Front of package labels (FOPL) are an effective means of communication with consumers at the point of decision-making and purchase. Adolescents may respond differently to different FOPL, and this may influence their decisions at point-of-purchase. For example, some FOPL such as Nutri-score, create summary indices of multiple nutrients, including nutrients of concern as well as beneficial nutrients, to present a product’s overall nutritional profile on a continuum from least to more healthy. This type of FOPL evaluates the overall nutritional profile of the product, without providing details on the levels at which nutrients of concern are present.
Other FOPL schemes, like the traffic light label, which colour-code multiple nutrients, convey complex information for the consumer to do an assessment of healthfulness of the product. This task could be challenging for products with high values of one nutrient of concern but low value of another nutrient of concern. Another type of FOPL are nutrient warnings, which are binary signals to consumers about the presence or absence of high levels of nutrients of concerns. While these nutrient warning that identify unhealth products most effectively discourage purchase of junk foods, we seek to generate evidence on the type of FOPL that might be more effective for our target population.
The purpose of this RFP is to engage services of a Service Provider to help determine the most effective FOPL to be used as part of the Food Investigator Game to help adolescents make better food choices. The research should be completed in two phases. The first phase is exploratory research to gain an understanding of the types of images and messages that carry the most meaning for adolescents and identify any barriers for comprehensibility in the local context. The objectives in this first phase are:
The second phase of research aims to test the acceptability, usability/interpretation, trustworthiness, discriminant validity of 3 FOPL with adolescents, specifically:
We seek a service provider that can deliver a research proposal that answers the exploratory and efficacy objectives noted above.
To determine the most effective FOPL that should be used as part of the Food Investigator Game to help adolescents make better food choices.
The service shall be performed between project is commenced from 22 March 2021 and 15 June 2021.
This section addresses the process for responding to this solicitation. Applicants are encouraged to review this prior to completing their responses.
