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While there are many opportunities to make agriculture more nutrition-sensitive, understanding how to influence behavior to address the indirect causes of malnutrition can be a challenge. USAID’s multi-sectoral nutrition project, SPRING, has developed an online training course for professionals who design and implement agriculture projects. The course builds knowledge and skills so participants can make agriculture projects more nutrition-sensitive by more effectively leveraging agriculture’s potential to contribute to specified nutrition outcomes.

How the horticulture and nutrition communities can work together to make fruits and vegetables a global priority.

Policies can make a big impact on a country’s progress toward ending malnutrition, including both undernutrition and overweight, obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Responsibility for nutrition often falls across various government ministry lines, requiring a range of policies and involving multiple sectors and stakeholder platforms. Comprehensive policy action is urgently needed to address malnutrition in all its forms if governments are to reach global targets to reduce undernutrition and diet-related NCDs.

Nutrition and agriculture practitioners rely on formative research to inform program design. Agriculture programming often conducts value chain analyses to identify constraints and opportunities to improve performance or competitiveness, while health programs use social and behavior change (SBC) tools to identify barriers and enablers to the adoption of improved household-level nutrition practices.

The current cut-offs for the determination of anemia were established in 1968 and have had minimal adjustments since. These thresholds have crucial implications for clinical and public health practice, affecting individual-level treatment protocols and our population prevalence data for local, national and global monitoring of anaemia.  The World Health Organization (WHO) is in the process of reviewing its global guidelines for haemoglobin thresholds used to define anaemia at the individual and population level. 

SPRING has been working in the last year with multiple partners to identify key information gaps for planning nutrition-sensitive agriculture activities, and then design rapid formative research to help fill those gaps.

The Sahel region of Niger is characterized by rural poverty and undernutrition, exacerbated by chronic climate extremes and associated crop failures. SPRING has been working to support a number of USAID-implementing partners in promoting the adoption of high-impact maternal, infant, and young child nutrition (MIYCN) and hygiene behaviors aimed to reduce endemic malnutrition and stunting in this context. In 2015, SPRING introduced a community video approach, building on earlier tools and guidance developed in collaboration with Digital Green in Odisha, India.

Data-driven decision-making in anemia involves inputs from various sectors and stakeholder groups in nutrition, disease control, health, water and sanitation, education, agriculture, gender and social welfare, and statistics. These groups tend to operate in their sectoral silos, with few opportunities to integrate information and data sources from other sectors to advise their policy and program decisions. This holds true at the national and also at the district level.

In Bangladesh, women are relatively less empowered in comparison to the male members in the household—in most cases, they are not in a position to take part in the household decision making process.Literature suggests that women, more specifically rural women, are less empowered as they are considered to have less potential to contribute to household income.