Thank you very much, Laurie. It's a very pertinent question.
The little bars you spoke about are these ready-to-use therapeutic food bars. They are very useful for severe acute-malnutrition treatment. They're actually very, very effective.
Yes, education is a key here. It was good to hear it mentioned earlier in answer to Hélène Laverdière's question. One of the problems we face is the recognition of nutrition as an issue. It's not only education; it's also awareness in the first instance that nutrition is crucially important for growth, for survival, for cognitive development, and for all these other very important life skills. Part of the educating of officials, which I think everybody in government will recognize, is that you need to move outside your box. You need to get across the divides.
Tanzania has been relatively successful at the district government level. Some of the integration of services, which we would like to see more of—we were talking about gender mainstreaming just now, and we would even talk about nutrition mainstreaming as well—really needs to take place and become embedded. I can speak to you about a movement called Scaling Up Nutrition. This particular movement has brought to a lot of people's consciousness, as I think more than 60 countries have signed up now, the fact that they have to take action not just by giving out vitamin A supplements, which are perhaps a little more easy to see, but also within the education system, within local government decision-making processes, to look at the outcomes for nutrition as well as for gender and other issues.
In terms of helping officials, I think it's educating them, yes, but it's also providing them with the tools for multi-sectoral planning, which is actually very, very crucial in this. The SUN movement, as we call the Scaling Up Nutrition movement, has invested in starting to build country capacity in this very area. If somebody takes a decision in the agriculture sector, we're hoping they will look at the effect it will have on the nutrition of the population they're serving.
I do agree with your point. I do agree that it's a very important piece, but I think it goes from awareness, through education, to also the tools for development. Perhaps Canada is well placed to provide technical assistance to good government, competent government, in that sense.