The Minimum Cost of a Healthy Diet

In 2006, Save the Children initiated a pilot research programme to quantify the extent to which households could afford to feed their children under the age of 2, and a whole family of 5 people, with a diet meeting minimum requirements of macro and micronutrients.

This involved expanding and refining some existing linear programming software (originally developed by WHO) for the analysis, and initiating data collection in selected communities in four countries - Bangladesh, Myanmar, Ethiopia and Tanzania - to trial the methodology and develop case study examples.

This report presents the findings relating to the cost and affordability of the cheapest possible diet in the four study locations.

Work of this kind has not been conducted in the developing world, and the approach taken here was ground-breaking by:

• attempting to determine the minimum cost and affordability of a diet for the whole family rather than just an individual child
• taking into account seasonal variation in prices and availability of food
• including costs and availability of food at the local level.