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Person

Leah Salm

Research Officer

Leah Salm is a Research Officer within the Health and Nutrition Cluster. Leah’s research centers around malnutrition, food systems, food equity and nutrition policy.

Leah works as an evidence synthesis specialist for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded project Transform Nutrition West Africa which aims to generate and mobilize high quality evidence and build nutrition decision making capacity in the West Africa region.

Leah is also leading a mixed-methods study of childhood obesity in Brighton & Hove. A whole-systems perspective is being applied to understand the trends and enabling environment context.

Leah is also collaborating with the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) project, whereby she is considering the food and nutrition equity challenges for famers across Sub-Saharan Africa during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Prior to working at IDS, Leah worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington DC, where she contributed to The Lancet Double Burden of Malnutrition Series.

Publications

Journal Article

Exploring the Drivers of Malnutrition in West Africa from Health and Social Science Perspectives: A Comparative Methodological Review

Methodological Innovations 14.3

West Africa has a high burden of malnutrition and the drivers are often complex, highly context-specific, and cut across individual, social, political and environmental domains. Public health research most often considers immediate individual health and diet drivers, at the expense of wider...

Leah Salm & 3 others

15 October 2021

Publication

The Current Landscape of Research on World Health Assembly Targets in West Africa: Two interdependent Review Outputs

The WHA 2025 nutrition targets have been used to track countries’ nutritional situations, measure progress in reducing malnutrition, and guide decision making. With a little more than five years remaining to attain the WHA targets, it is a critical time to coordinate the nutrition community...

Leah Salm & 6 others

21 April 2021

Journal Article

How Climate Change Interacts with Inequity to Affect Nutrition

WIREs Climate Change 12.2

Climate change poses a growing threat to the achievement of optimal nutritional status, both directly through affecting food production and indirectly through altering social and economic influences in people's lives. These adverse nutrition outcomes are not evenly distributed across the world,...

Leah Salm & 4 others

8 December 2020