With Feed the Future’s twin goals of increasing agricultural production and improving nutrition for women and children, we’ve seen increasing emphasis on value chain activities to support the production of nutrient-rich commodities. But how do traditional market development activities orient their investments beyond improved sales and market share for additional benefits like encouraging consumption of nutrient-rich commodities? And how can these efforts and their potential impact on nutrition be measured?
SPRING and Land O’Lakes International Development co-hosted this webinar to explore these questions. Last year, the Strategic Planning and Performance Management Office in the Bureau for Food Security engaged the SPRING project to assist in identifying challenges and possible solutions to the collection of data for the new Feed the Future indicator for nutrition-sensitive agriculture. SPRING shared the broad findings from this multi-country research which led to the development of a data collection guidance document. Land O’Lakes shared their lessons-learned in collecting consumption data in the field, as well as the overall role of livestock and animal-sourced foods in impacting household nutrition. This includes addressing how people use their animals and how farmers make decisions around the trade-offs between income and nutrition. Land O’Lakes works worldwide to facilitate transformative change in the dairy and livestock sectors and increase demand for animal-sourced products, drawing on experiences from Bangladesh, Rwanda, Kenya and Malawi in this webinar. Land O’Lakes’ participation was part of a year-long initiative to roll out learning activities around the linkages between livestock production and human nutrition, partially supported by the TOPS project.
Lidan Du, Research Advisor with SPRING presented the project’s research and work with the Bureau for Food Security exploring the NRVCC indicator. Land O’Lakes staff in the field dove deeper into program experience collecting information about animal-sourced foods and their role for households. Sarah Titus, Manager of Food Security and Nutrition at SPRING moderated.
Perspectives from the Field: Measuring and Promoting Animal Source Foods (PDF, 1.25 MB)
NRVCC: A Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture Indicator of Feed the Future (PDF, 1.59 MB)
