Background
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Policies at the local level can hold major influence in mobilizing the local government and its constituents towards contributing to the achievement of positive outcomes for nutrition. Several local governments in the country have harnessed the power of such ordinances and many of these have resulted to commendable impact. The stories of how these outstanding ordinances were formulated, adopted, and implemented, can serve as inspiration and guide for other local government units in moving towards improved local level implementation of nutrition actions. 

Given the need to increase the number of performing local governments units in nutrition, a knowledge-sharing platform of best practices and success stories in policy development for food and nutrition is highly valuable at present. Such platform will be of use to provincial, city, and municipal local governments and continuously updated to include new innovations in the field. A Compendium will facilitate the ease of replicating the success of local governments and allow them to craft policies that would lead to improved implementation of nutrition programs. 

The Compendium
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The Compendium of Local Ordinances and Issuances on Nutrition serves as a knowledge-sharing platform for local government units to learn from initiatives of local government units who have successfully harnessed the strength of policy instruments in scaling up nutrition. The project aims to widely disseminate actual examples of effective local policies on nutrition through the form of an electronic online compilation and a printed publication, that can be publicly accessed and used as reference by local governments aspiring to improve their implementation of nutrition programs.

Online Portal

There are 208 local ordinances and 45 executive orders initially uploaded in the portal, coming from submissions from provincial, city, and municipal local governments across the 17 regions of the Philippines. (As of 1 October 2020)

The uploaded local ordinances and issuances in the portal have been selected based on four criteria namely: Responsiveness, Coverage and Reach, Impact, and Replicability. The NNC Regional Offices and the National Project Team composed of members from the NNC Central Office, NAOPA, and the NTEAM TAN Providers supported by Nutrition International conducted a rigorous review process to determine the final ordinances uploaded in the online portal and those that will be featured in the printed publication. 

Printed Publication 

Twenty (20) local ordinances have been selected to be part of the Compendium of Local Ordinances on Nutrition publication. These ordinances have exhibited much success in improving the nutrition landscape in the implementing LGU. The key features of these ordinances shall be presented in a four-page narrative that highlights key lessons from the formulation, adoption, and implementation of the nutrition and nutrition-related ordinances in such LGUs. Such lessons are useful to other local governments who wish to adopt similar ordinances in their own contexts to scale up the implementation of their local nutrition programs.

The Compendium of Local Ordinances and Issuances on Nutrition is a dynamic and living project. Both the online Compendium portal and the printed publication shall be updated progressively through the years to cover more and new local ordinances and issuances on nutrition from local governments who wish to contribute to the platform and share their effective local policy development initiatives to scale up nutrition.

Acknowledgments
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The Compendium of Local Ordinances and Issuances on Nutrition is a project of the National Nutrition Council in partnership with the Nutrition Officers Association of the Philippines (NAOPA), with support from Nutrition International and UNICEF Philippines.