The Framework
An admiration by Detlef PalmWhen you google ‘UNICEF Framework’, you will in all probability be directed to the mother of all conceptual frameworks, among a choice of very similarly looking colourful graphics:
The search for the UNICEF framework will bring up nutrition frameworks, protection frameworks, development frameworks and others. They all have their origin in the UNICEF nutrition framework that saw the light of day in the 1990 Strategy for Improved Nutrition of Children and Women in Developing Countries. A UNICEF Policy Review. The paper, prepared for the 1990 UNICEF Executive Board, carries the distinctive hand of Urban Jonsson and remains one of the most frequently quoted documents on this matter. It is surprisingly hard to retrieve.
Urban Jonsson is rightly remembered for his rigorous research and thinking. The publication of the Conceptual Framework for Malnutrition and Death set an indelible mark, and has changed the approach to development programming ever since. The genius of the framework is not grounded in findings of specially commissioned longitudinal studies or complicated research. In contrast, its brilliance lies in suggesting an organizing principle for the analysis of a perplexing problem. It proposes the logical arrangement of known facts, bringing order into the often chaotic and diverse streams of analytical thought, thus aiding the identification of strategies that will help to solve the original issue.
The conceptual framework is the graphic representation of the immediate causes of a complex situation (nowadays often referred to as the determinants of an ‘outcome’), and the various layers of underlying and even more underlying and eventually basic causes. The determinants for malnutrition (notably insufficient household food security, inadequate maternal and childcare, and insufficient health service and an unhealthy environment) were known much earlier and were already mentioned at the UNICEF Bellagio conference in 1964. But specialists and agencies continued to pursue their activities according to their own orientation and mandate. While progress was made on different fronts, it did not necessarily coalesce in outcomes that many people had in mind, namely good nutrition as a basis for a child’s full development. A uniting theory and an organizing framework were missing. Therefore, for anyone interested in establishing causalities of a problem, the conceptual framework was a revelation; development professionals were one step closer to finding the theory of everything.
The Conceptual Framework of Malnutrition is of eternal duration, notwithstanding the changes that it went through in time. Graduate students would write their thesis on how the visual of the framework changed from one year to the next. Generations of nutritionists and other development workers kept on adding layers, adding a fourth immediate cause to the existing three, using colours and different type of arrows, or turning it into a set of square building blocks. Adjusted diagrams have been used in the most recent UNICEF Nutrition Strategy and regularly turn up in scientific publications. New versions are being fashioned as you read this, but they all remain simple variations of the main idea.
UNICEF guidance on results-based programming (RBM) was inspired by the idea of a conceptual framework. The first axiom of RBM holds that to solve a problem known to have more than one cause, one needs to address all causes. Interventions must not only be necessary, but also sufficient.
Urban Jonsson is rightly remembered for his rigorous research and thinking. The publication of the Conceptual Framework for Malnutrition and Death set an indelible mark, and has changed the approach to development programming ever since. The genius of the framework is not grounded in findings of specially commissioned longitudinal studies or complicated research. In contrast, its brilliance lies in suggesting an organizing principle for the analysis of a perplexing problem. It proposes the logical arrangement of known facts, bringing order into the often chaotic and diverse streams of analytical thought, thus aiding the identification of strategies that will help to solve the original issue.
The conceptual framework is the graphic representation of the immediate causes of a complex situation (nowadays often referred to as the determinants of an ‘outcome’), and the various layers of underlying and even more underlying and eventually basic causes. The determinants for malnutrition (notably insufficient household food security, inadequate maternal and childcare, and insufficient health service and an unhealthy environment) were known much earlier and were already mentioned at the UNICEF Bellagio conference in 1964. But specialists and agencies continued to pursue their activities according to their own orientation and mandate. While progress was made on different fronts, it did not necessarily coalesce in outcomes that many people had in mind, namely good nutrition as a basis for a child’s full development. A uniting theory and an organizing framework were missing. Therefore, for anyone interested in establishing causalities of a problem, the conceptual framework was a revelation; development professionals were one step closer to finding the theory of everything.
The Conceptual Framework of Malnutrition is of eternal duration, notwithstanding the changes that it went through in time. Graduate students would write their thesis on how the visual of the framework changed from one year to the next. Generations of nutritionists and other development workers kept on adding layers, adding a fourth immediate cause to the existing three, using colours and different type of arrows, or turning it into a set of square building blocks. Adjusted diagrams have been used in the most recent UNICEF Nutrition Strategy and regularly turn up in scientific publications. New versions are being fashioned as you read this, but they all remain simple variations of the main idea.
UNICEF guidance on results-based programming (RBM) was inspired by the idea of a conceptual framework. The first axiom of RBM holds that to solve a problem known to have more than one cause, one needs to address all causes. Interventions must not only be necessary, but also sufficient.
UNICEF programme policy went as far as to require that HQ programme sections create a conceptual framework for the key issues that UNICEF globally wanted to address, based on the available best knowledge and experience. Reinforced with such universal conceptual frameworks, programme officers would be able to organize their country-based situation analyses, and map out strategies that would most likely help to achieve the planned result.
The 1990 Nutrition Strategy also contained the diagram of the Triple A cycle. In spite of their very different looks, the conceptual framework and the AAA are often confused or thought to be the same.
The Triple A concept emerged from theory and practice of the community-based Iringa nutrition project, which was operational from 1983 to 1988 as part of the Joint Nutrition Support Programme (JNSP). The Triple A cycle was to denote the collective learning process among community members, who over a longer period of trial and error would find the solution to the malnutrition of their children. The intervention prioritized the management of the collective learning process over the simple transfer of knowledge. Iringa became the place of pilgrimage of many an aspiring and renowned development worker. However, results were not sustained. Iringa was, again, the place of another UNICEF nutrition project from 2013 to 2017, with an evaluation unable to vouch for any success on the account of project management issues.
Meanwhile, Triple A had become a catchphrase. Urban Jonsson continued to keep the idea alive, elevating the need for better Triple A to all levels of society and administrations and making it part of his version of the human rights to programming approach. But Triple A lost its glamour and was mostly used to remind a UNICEF colleague to start thinking before speaking.
In 2016, Urban wrote that ‘the community-based nutrition paradigm has survived until today, but was replaced in the mid-1990s. […] The convincing evidence that [protein-energy] malnutrition in children in low-income countries is the result of historical, economic and social inequalities, maintained by the politics exercised by those in power, became unbearably embarrassing for both conservative governments and many donor agencies, including The World Bank.’ Whether or not the Triple A construct became the victim of a conspiracy of local and world powers, is for the reader to decide.
The Triple A concept emerged from theory and practice of the community-based Iringa nutrition project, which was operational from 1983 to 1988 as part of the Joint Nutrition Support Programme (JNSP). The Triple A cycle was to denote the collective learning process among community members, who over a longer period of trial and error would find the solution to the malnutrition of their children. The intervention prioritized the management of the collective learning process over the simple transfer of knowledge. Iringa became the place of pilgrimage of many an aspiring and renowned development worker. However, results were not sustained. Iringa was, again, the place of another UNICEF nutrition project from 2013 to 2017, with an evaluation unable to vouch for any success on the account of project management issues.
Meanwhile, Triple A had become a catchphrase. Urban Jonsson continued to keep the idea alive, elevating the need for better Triple A to all levels of society and administrations and making it part of his version of the human rights to programming approach. But Triple A lost its glamour and was mostly used to remind a UNICEF colleague to start thinking before speaking.
In 2016, Urban wrote that ‘the community-based nutrition paradigm has survived until today, but was replaced in the mid-1990s. […] The convincing evidence that [protein-energy] malnutrition in children in low-income countries is the result of historical, economic and social inequalities, maintained by the politics exercised by those in power, became unbearably embarrassing for both conservative governments and many donor agencies, including The World Bank.’ Whether or not the Triple A construct became the victim of a conspiracy of local and world powers, is for the reader to decide.
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