Technical Advisor, MCHN Social and Behavior Change
Washington, D.C.

Tara Kovach has more than 13 years of experience in developing and implementing health communication programs, with an emphasis on child health and nutrition, maternal/reproductive health, and infectious disease prevention and control, including work on HIV/AIDS and malaria. She has an MPH from Johns Hopkins University, with a dual focus on maternal/child health and health communication.

Tara, what do you do at FANTA?

As a social and behavior change (SBC) technical advisor at FANTA, I develop tools and participatory approaches to assist stakeholders to prioritize SBC interventions and create strategies to coordinate advocacy, social mobilization, and behavior change communication efforts at the country level. I also spend time assisting FANTA countries to create an enabling environment for improved nutrition—from the national level to the districts—by developing materials to support their nutrition advocacy plan and working with teams in country to conduct advocacy activities to improve nutrition.

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, which is available now to country-level practitioners. The PROFILES tool calculates consequences if malnutrition does not improve over a defined time period, and benefits of improved nutrition over the same period, including lives saved, disabilities averted, and economic productivity gains, but was never made available to the public. We saw an opportunity to strengthen the use of this tool. To help governments determine the feasibility of investing in nutrition, we developed an approach to determine costs of a comprehensive nutrition program. At the same time, we recognized the tools alone would not be effective without a comprehensive and participatory approach to nutrition advocacy that includes creating a national nutrition advocacy plan with clear objectives, target audiences, and advocacy materials, as well as taking the process down to the districts.