Technical Officer III, Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition
Washington, DC
Lesley Oot, has more than 8 years of experience in program support/implementation and technical assistance on maternal and child health programs in Africa and Asia, with a specific focus on nutrition. Her technical expertise includes maternal, adolescent, and child nutrition, food security, and nutrition advocacy. She has an MPH from Emory University, with a concentration in global health and public nutrition.
Lesley, what do you do at FANTA?
As a Technical Officer III at FANTA, I support FANTA’s global nutrition initiatives in the Maternal and Child Health and Nutrition Cluster through the development of tools, research, reference and advocacy materials, and implementation guidance. I also assist FANTA countries by using PROFILES, our nutrition advocacy tool, to create an enabling environment for improved nutrition through stakeholder engagement and development of PROFILES estimates for use in the creation of national and sub-national advocacy materials. In addition, I provide managerial and technical support to FANTA’s drought mitigation activities in Swaziland.
What has been your proudest moment on the FANTA project?
My proudest moment was being part of the team that created a robust nutrition advocacy process around the use of the PROFILES tool. FANTA is in the final stages of developing a manual that will help facilitate the four steps in our nutrition advocacy process; both the manual and PROFILES will be made available to the public. PROFILES calculates consequences if malnutrition does not improve over a defined time period, and the benefits of improved nutrition over the same period, including lives saved, childhood overweight/obesity prevented, disabilities averted, and economic productivity and human capital gains. Over the past five years we have been working to make PROFILES a more comprehensive and user-friendly tool. We’ve updated old models and added three models that will help advocate for the promotion of optimal breastfeeding practices and highlight how the benefits of good nutrition go beyond having an impact on mortality—to having life-long influences on human capital and productivity. This work has been exciting because PROFILES and the manual can help create a supportive enabling environment for nutrition, which is critical for ensuring sustainable and measurable change in nutrition.
