Promoting Nutritious Food Systems in the Pacific:
Marshall Islands National Action Plan
The participatory creation of the National Action Plan during the Fiji Forum aims to provide tailor-made approaches in order to tackle specific in-country challenges and make use of opportunities at national level for agribusiness and value chain development.
The plan addresses four key themes:
1.NUTRITION: Reduction in NCDs and food imports and increased income from investments made in the development of local food crops and fisheries value chains
- Impact Aims: Increase dietary diversity at household level and improve production and sale of fresh and processed nutrient dense local food crops and fisheries
- Key Innovations / Critical Success Factors: Multi-sectoral collaboration; Adequate funding for implementation; Coordination of government actions; Leadership of respective ministerial departments for agreed actions as identified in the national policy documents
2. FINANCE – Making farmers bank ready and banks farmer ready
- Impact Aims: Increase access to finance for farmers/ SMEs and improve collaboration between commercial and development backs and donors
- Key Innovations / Critical success factors: ICT enabled financial services; blended finance; networks/ aggregation of farmers/fisher folk/SMEs to leverage access to services; capacity building of Framers
3. ICT – Robust Communication System for Growers / SMEs
- Impact Aims: Farmers / SMEs increase the adoption and application of ICTs to improve production efficiencies, marketing and business systems
- Key Innovations/ Critical success factors : Investments in mobile phone network; increased phone penetration in the remote and rural islands to service all farmers, there is an operating mobile banking network in place
4. INSURANCE – Robust Insurance Package for Farmers
- Impact Aims: Increase awareness of key stakeholders on advantages and disadvantages of weather index based insurance
- Key Innovations/Critical Success Factors: Bundled insurance products; ICT enabled services for processing claims; Sound banking and ICT (phone) infrastructure (mobile banking in place); legal system in place for insurance schemes; Database of farmers; Competent RMI meteorological service; Access to historical databases with sufficient data
Each theme is addressed under the sections:
- Action
- Partners involved
- Stakeholder Targeted
- Resources Required
- Timeframe
- Method of Verification
Download the Marshall Islands National Action Plan here.
As part of the consultation process, interested parties are invited to provide feedback through joining the Marshall Islands online discussion group or through the contact form here.
A national transformation is essential to reduce dependence, increase local food production and consumption and to improve food and nutrition security and that we need to undertake additional diagnostics and analysis in order to have a stronger foundation for a strategy and action plan to pursue this transformation – Ben Graham, Chief Secretary, Republic of the Marshall Islands
Are you interested in the Agriculture-Nutrition Nexus in the Marshall Islands? Download the report below which includes an overview of organisations working on agriculture, food and nutrition; the policy and institutional framework and key recommendations on how to strengthen the Agriculture-Nutrition Nexus in the Marshall Islands.
Building the evidence base on the agricultural nutrition nexus: Marshall Islands