Giving Compass' Take: 

• Cadbury Nigeria's parent company, Mondelez International, is rolling out a nutritional campaign that is aimed at elementary school children to adopt better eating habits and healthier lifestyles. 

• How successful will this nutritional health campaign end up being since it is run by a company that sells chocolate?

• Read about how to encourage more investment in global nutrition.

Cadbury Nigeria is known best for the chocolate drinks and mint sweets that line grocery store shelves around the country – which made their nutrition project something of a surprise.

Cadbury’s parent company, Mondelez International, launched the program to encourage healthier lifestyles for Nigerian youth at the end of June. The three-part effort will work with primary school children to increase their nutrition knowledge, push them to exercise and teach them gardening.

However, the project, part of Mondelez’s broader $50 million corporate responsibility effort across 10 countries, has raised some concerns about how a private sector corporation that profits off of non-nutritious products can responsibly encourage children to be healthier.

Given growing global concerns about the rise of the double burden of malnutrition – countries contending with both undernutrition and overweight – experts in Nigeria have urged officials to put programs in place that help keep those rates down. And that’s where Mondelez came in.

The pilot phase will include nine public primary schools in the Ikeja community in southwestern Nigeria, where the project will provide seeds and gardening training for students, parents and teachers, as well as educating food vendors on diversifying food choices for the children.

Cadbury’s role in promoting nutritional initiatives has raised some questions, though, particularly around whether the company is using the initiative to promote unhealthy products. It is part of a broader debate taking place within the nutrition community about how to integrate private sector partners that make money off of non-nutritious products and ensure their participation does not actually undermine the mission of reducing malnutrition. With the Mondelez partnership, HKI is now in the spotlight.

Read the full article about malnutrition by Wana Udobang at News Deeply