The Infant & Young Child Nutrition (IYCN) Project is pleased to introduce a set of resources, including a Nutritional Impact Assessment Tool, to help agriculture project designers maximize nutritional benefits for women, children, and other vulnerable groups. This week, the IYCN Project will share the new resources at the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health Conference in New Delhi, India, where agriculture, health, and nutrition colleagues will explore how to better use investments in agriculture to achieve nutrition security and good health for the world’s poorest people.
Bringing women’s and children’s nutrition to the forefront of agriculture
The most nutritionally vulnerable populations, particularly women and children, should benefit from efforts to improve agriculture. Yet their nutritional needs often have low priority for agricultural projects focused on increasing production and incomes. By putting women’s and children’s nutrition needs at the forefront of the planning process, agriculture projects can reduce malnutrition and build healthy futures. IYCN’s new resources offer practical guidance for project designers aiming to meet this challenge.
Resources now available
Achieving Nutritional Impact and Food Security through Agriculture (fact sheet) offers examples of what works and what does not when it comes to improving nutrition and food security and recommends design strategies that can increase food security and nutrition benefits.
Nutrition and Food Security Impacts of Agriculture Projects: A Review of Experience summarizes more than 30 years of project and research experience on food security and nutrition impacts of agricultural interventions in low-income countries.
Nutritional Impact Assessment Tool (Beta) assists in assessing an agriculture project’s likely impacts on the nutrition of vulnerable groups. When it is not possible to include nutrition objectives in the design of a project, conducting a nutritional impact assessment during the planning process can help to avoid unintended negative impacts. Request a beta version of this tool by contacting info@iycn.org.
Photos: PATH/Evelyn Hockstein
Date: Feb 12, 2011 | Category: News alerts