Enhance

The global challenges of malnutrition and climate change demand urgent solutions. Nearly 750 million people face hunger, 3 billion cannot afford a healthy diet, and food systems contribute a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions while exerting additional environmental pressures. Addressing these interconnected issues requires transforming food systems to ensure that affordable, healthy and sustainable diets are possible under the conditions of climate change. However, existing tools struggle to handle large datasets or provide timely, actionable insights. Without an integrated platform, decision-makers lack the evidence needed to tackle these challenges effectively and to drive equitable food systems transformation. 

Enhance is a cloud-based platform that transforms how the cost, nutrition, and sustainability of healthy diets are analysed. It combines built-in data on human nutrition requirements, nutrient composition and environmental impacts of food production with user-provided food price data to deliver optimized diet solutions. Users can customize parameters to generate tailored food baskets that balance affordability, nutritional adequacy, and environmental sustainability and explore transformative pathways by evaluating win-win scenarios. Enhance empowers governments, partners and organizations to design impactful, data-driven strategies to address malnutrition, improve food security and promote healthier, more sustainable food systems. 

ENHANCE has so far been used to calculate the cost and affordability of nutritious and healthy diets in 14 countries, and it is expected to be rolled out in at least nine additional countries in 2025. With its optimization methods, ENHANCE can perform analyses that used to take two to three weeks in two to three days with reduced errors. It can identify multiple diets across criteria such as regions, seasons and individuals in one to two minutes rather than one to two days.

ENHANCE made it possible for WFP Zambia to conduct a multiyear analysis on the cost and affordability of their basket. Using 12 years of data, they could understand the changing costs of the diet against various climate indicators to inform their anticipatory action frameworks, ensuring robust and sustainable basket allocation in the country office.