The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) is an independent non-profit foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland. GAIN was developed at the UN 2002 Special Session of the General Assembly on Children.
GAIN is an organisation driven by the vision of a world without malnutrition. To achieve its goal, GAIN mobilises public-private partnerships and provides financial and technical support to deliver nutritious foods to those people most at risk of malnutrition.
The Marketplace for Nutritious Food ("The Marketplace") is a platform that fosters innovation and drives investment in the production, marketing, and consumption of nutritious foods made from locally-produced agricultural products. The Marketplace provides access to knowledge, networks, and technical and financial assistance to help businesses in low-income countries use local agriculture to contribute to the fight against malnutrition.
By working with investable businesses to support innovations all along the agricultural value chain - from the production of crops to processing and food preparation - the Marketplace makes a sustainable contribution to agricultural and enterprise development as well as to dietary diversity which contributes to improved nutritional status in the household.
The Marketplace's two-pronged approach supports a broad network of stakeholders. The Community of Practice builds networks and entrepreneurs' capacity, while targeted technical and financial support is offered to promising, innovative enterprises through the Innovation Accelerator.
- Innovation Accelerator: Supports local agri-businesses with technical and financial assistance to bring their nutritious food innovations to market
- Community of Practice: Brings together stakeholders from business, government, investors, donors, NGOs for joint learning, networking, and building an enabling environment for nutrition
- Access to Finance: Establishes links to private investors
The Marketplace for Nutritious Foods has helped many local businesses get off the ground by fostering innovation and promoting investment to transform local agriculture into accessible, nutritious foods and has helped bring over 10 million servings of nutritious food to local markets.
The project is currently active in Mozambique, Kenya, and Rwanda.
About the project
Goals
GAIN Marketplace for Nutritious Foods helps link those supplying good food, with local consumers in markets across Africa. A range of new, national sites was needed as the organisation reaches out into new markets.
Requirements and solution
GAIN needed an immediate website for their project in Rwanda but could see it would need more sites in future, with a pipeline of at least five other markets. Each would need to be bilingual in English and their local language, and needed to be accessible on mobile and in areas where internet speeds may be poor.
Rather than create a series of individual sites, Website Express proposed a single new website platform, under which each market could be added easily when required. Each country microsite is easy to set up, with a second language selected and content that can be created and edited by a specified site administrator, within a preset structure.
The site is designed to load fast, by reducing image use but using CSS3 techniques to provide a rich visual experience. Page caching and the hosting solution’s Content Delivery Network make for reliable, quick appearance. A fully responsive design ensures it is always looking its best across desktop, mobile or tablet.
Key objectives:
- a master site enabling subsites to be quickly and easily created
- easy selection of a second language ensuring bilingual capability
- simple website design for fast loading despite poor internet connectivity
- design that navigates well on mobile, the likely source for many visitors
- easy to use content management system allowing client to add and amend content
Outcome
The new platform allows GAIN staff to set up, and update subsites themselves.
Two existing sites, covering Mozambique and Kenya, have been incorporated into the platform, with a new site for Rwanda the first to be added.
With at least five future sites identified, the team will be able to create these directly, saving time and money.
Why Drupal was chosen
GAIN have previously used the Drupal system for a number of other projects, and their project teams are very confident and comfortable to administer a site built using Drupal.
The Marketplace site required a number of country projects to be independently maintained and to have varying levels of multilingual support.
Drupal's impressive multilingual abilities together with Organic Groups and flexible role-based permissions made it the obvious choice for the development of the Marketplace site.
Other key factors for choosing Drupal included:
- open source with an established community
- a strong commercial ecosystem
- a well planned roadmap for future development
- support for mobile devices and responsive design
- strong multilingual capabilities out-of-the-box
- flexible role-based content administration workflows
- customisable organic group capabilities
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Drupal 7 was chosen as the most stable version of Drupal core which also had the best support for contributed modules needed to provide the functionality required.
Theme and Display
The AdaptiveTheme theme was selected as the most suitable starting theme providing component-based CSS and a responsive, mobile-first grid design to build the Marketplace design with.
