Nourished Truth – South Africa

In 2022, FLRF began adapting the policy operationalization approach to plan a counter-formula advocacy and engagement campaign in South Africa, in collaboration with local partners.

Called Nourished Truth, it aims to protect, promote and support breastfeeding by creating an environment where women’s breastfeeding choices are not influenced by unethical, inappropriate marketing of infant formula. Nourished Truth is now being rolled out for implementation.

The project launched with the University of the Western Cape and its DSTI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security, and was led by Dr. Chantell Witten and Professor Jullian May, Director of the DSTI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security.

They conducted an in-depth investigation of South Africa’s breastfeeding environment, supported by a technical working group and guided by a steering committee. Their findings provided the basis for the project’s next chapter – building a nationally tailored counter-formula advocacy and engagement campaign.  

FLRF partnered with HEALA (the Healthy Living Alliance) to build the campaign. Using data uncovered by the investigation, HEALA created targeted messages – tested them with target audiences – and planned their outreach strategy. Nourished Truth will be implemented nationally over two years. 

Are you interested in helping HEALA raise funds for multi-year campaign impact? Contact them here: info@heala.org.  

Are you interested in implementing Nourished Truth in your community? The partners are publishing a free playbook that lays out the process, step by step. Countries can use it, and its detailed templates, to build their own specialized and scalable advocacy and engagement campaigns. It will be available soon on LactaHub.   

If you would like more information about Nourished Truth, we are happy to share our learnings. Please contact us at kathrin.litwan@larsson-rosenquist.org.  

Nourished Truth aligns with the strategic initiative of the World Health Organization to help countries strengthen legislation that counters the aggressive formula milk marketing outlined in the 2022 WHO and UNICEF report: How the marketing of formula milk influences our decisions on infant feeding.