During the IAEA International Symposium on Understanding Moderate Malnutrition in Children for Effective Interventions from 26 to 29 May 2014, Paluku Bahwere, Research Programme Coordinator, Valid International, spoke to the IAEA's Sasha Henriques about the importance of communication and collaboration in nutrition research:
"Poor people, in remote rural communities are most often affected by moderate acute malnutrition.
"So it's very important that we, as a nutrition community, make our interventions available to the rural poor, who bear the greatest burden when it comes to malnutrition.
"Improving the reach and accessibility of nutrition interventions is one of Valid International's main areas of interest at the moment. We want to learn from ongoing and completed research about the types of nutrition interventions that actually work.
"And we want to make sure that such successful interventions are scaled up, and made accessible to vulnerable communities, by facilitating collaboration between the public and private sectors, international groups, and non-governmental organizations.
"As a nutrition community we are all struggling with the high rate of chronic and acute malnutrition around the world because there are still so many things we don't know. We think that a conference like this can help all the researchers to learn from each other and point us in new directions, give us new areas of focus for our research efforts to address this problem effectively.
"Valid International was part of the scientific/technical committee that developed the programme for this Symposium. We want to contribute to the malnutrition efforts being undertaken globally and on a country level. That's the main reason we're so excited about collaborating with the IAEA and other international partners in fora like these."