Strengthening Systems for Nutrition

As the SPRING office reached its fourth full year of implementation in Uganda, the project prepared to shift focus from the district to the national level, working in a coordinated way across sectors to accelerate industrial food fortification and reduce anemia. We also continued to integrate nutrition assessment, counselling, and support into heath facilities; enhance community outreach; and improve referral and follow-up mechanisms in health facilities.

In Nigeria, SPRING continued to support orphans and other vulnerable children, helping USAID-funded projects and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to integrate infant and young child feeding interventions into existing President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)-funded programs. With a focus on capacity building, we conducted supportive supervision visits and led nutrition trainings for government counterparts, community volunteers, and primary healthcare center (PHC) workers across the country.

SPRING also opened its office in Mali and began activities to increase access to diverse and quality foods and roll out farmer-nutrition school trainings. Those trainings instructed 500 leaders who eventually reached 5,500 people with messages about best practices for optimal nutrition and hygiene. To reach our FY15 training target, we educated 375 participants in essential nutrition and hygiene actions and triggered 15 villages in community-led total sanitation.

We established an office in the Kyrgyz Republic and launched activities, including a baseline survey, formative research, and other critical analyses and trainings to build the capacity of over 7,000 people to deliver nutrition services and messages. SPRING also trained and mobilized over 2,000 community volunteers who began disseminating key nutrition messages to households and communities throughout target areas.

In Haiti, SPRING closed out its office in Port-au-Prince after three years of successful implementation. The Haiti team focused on enhancing nutrition systems and building capacity for delivery of quality nutrition services.

SPRING launched its Ghana country office, which focuses on improving delivery of high-impact services and generating increased demand for those services. These activities resulted in the creation of the “1,000-day household” approach, which encompasses a range of social and behavior change communication activities.

The SPRING project in Bangladesh continued to scale up its work to integrate essential nutrition and hygiene actions into government-sponsored projects and build nutrition capacity among frontline health and agriculture extension workers, growing its coverage of the target population from 30 to 50 percent. We established 1,280 new farmer nutrition schools (FNS) in fiscal year 2015, reaching an additional 24,028 women.

At the close of SPRING's fourth year of implementation, we influenced global health and development communities through thought leadership around multi-sectoral nutrition programing.

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