Enhance

The challenges of ensuring good nutrition while limiting negative environmental pressures on the planet are complex. In a world where 3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, smart, informed decision making is critical to transforming food systems under climate restraints. However, existing data and analysis tools are often unable to handle large datasets or provide timely, actionable insights into the relationships between nutrition, economics and sustainability. Without an integrated platform, decision-makers lack the data needed to tackle these challenges effectively and to drive equitable food systems transformation.

Enhance helps WFP staff explore the intersections of affordability, healthy diets and environmental sustainability through its analytical platform. Its cloud-based platform 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.

WFP staff using ENHANCE can customize parameters to generate tailored food baskets that balance affordability, nutritional adequacy and environmental sustainability, as well as explore transformative pathways by evaluating win-win scenarios. It can analyse an unlimited number of data points, making it possible to make detailed multi-year assessments of these indicators.

In this way, 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.