Training

The SPRING/Mali program closed out on March 31, 2016, after 15 months of work in-country improving nutritional status of women and children, with special emphasis on building resilience in Mali’s Mopti region by treating and preventing undernutrition.

SPRING’s Food Security and Nutrition Director, Heather Danton, and SBCC Advisor, Phil Moses, traveled to Guinea in April to facilitate a week-long participatory workshop with partners from Winrock, Institut Superieur Agronomique et Vétérinaire (ISAV), and local NGOs. The workshop aimed to inform SPRING partners’ behavior change and agricultural extension work related to nutrition-sensitive agriculture. The workshop covered the agriculture-to-nutrition pathways and principles and other key concepts, such as criteria for selecting crops that address nutrient gaps in local diets.

SPRING attended the Micronutrient Task Team (MTT) Meeting in Accra, Ghana on February 17, 2016. The MTT is a multi-stakeholder group spearheaded by the Nutrition Department of the Family Health Division of the Ghana Health Service (GHS). Micronutrients Technical Advisor Denish Moorthy presented the findings from the report on the Landscape Analysis on Anemia and Anemia Programming in Ghana, which was developed by SPRING with support from the GHS. Consultant Dr.

The regions in the north of Ghana have a high prevalence of anemia among children under five, and pregnant and non-pregnant women of reproductive age. Recognizing the limited anemia screening capacity at Ghana Health Service (GHS) facilities, USAID, through the SPRING and RING projects, distributed HemoCue® devices to these facilities in the Northern, Upper East, and Upper West Regions of the country. HemoCue® devices are used to measure hemoglobin levels in the blood for the purpose of screening for anemia.

The U.S. Ambassador to Ghana, Robert P. Jackson, took an informative tour of the community-based health planning and services (CHPS) compound in Kasuliyili of the Tolon District in the Northern Region on March 31, 2016. This was the Ambassador’s first visit to northern Ghana where there are major U.S. Government-funded projects in agriculture and nutrition under the Feed the Future initiative. Dr.