GLOBAL INITIATIVES

Childhood Obesity Prevention Initiative

Helping cities create healthier childhoods

All children should have the opportunity to grow up healthy, regardless of who they are or where they live. Yet today, one in five children live with overweight or obesity, with those in underserved communities often facing the greatest barriers to health.³

The Childhood Obesity Prevention Initiative (COPI) works with six cities across Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, South Africa and Spain to design, implement and evaluate community-based approaches that support healthier outcomes for children in underserved urban communities.

AT A GLANCE

How it works

COPI combines global evidence with local action. Working with communities and partners in each city, interventions are co-designed to reflect local priorities and realities while contributing to a shared evidence base and cross-city learning network.

All interventions are guided by four principles:

Dual focus on healthy food and physical activity

Addressing what children eat and how they move to increase potential impact.

Community-driven design

Co-developing interventions alongside local communities to support relevance and sustainability.

Multi-level action

Supporting healthier choices through building both enabling environments and individual agency, in the places that shape daily life.

Equity-oriented action

Focusing efforts in underserved communities where support is needed most.

Measuring impact

In each city, data are collected before the interventions begin, then one year after implementation and again after two years in order to measure:

Food and physical activity behaviours
Health-related quality of life
Body mass index (BMI)

At each stage, the findings help strengthen interventions and build a shared understanding of what works in different schools and communities.

Who we work with

In each city, COPI brings together local governments, schools, researchers, community organisations and families to co-design and deliver interventions shaped by local needs.

The initiative is supported globally by Novo Nordisk, Delivery Associates and the Behavioural Insights Team, with the University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences as a global scientific partner.