Infant & Young Child Nutrition Project launches new resources to help agriculture project designers achieve improved nutrition

The Infant & Young Child Nutrition (IYCN) Project is pleased to introduce a set of resources, including theNutritional Impact Assessment Tool, to help agriculture project designers maximize nutritional benefits for women, children, and other vulnerable groups. This week, IYCN 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.

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.

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. Available from the IYCN website.

Nutrition and Food Security Impacts of Agriculture Projects: A Review of Experiencesummarizes more than 30 years of project and research experience on food security and nutrition impacts of agricultural interventions in low-income countries. Available from the IYCN website.

Integrating Household Nutrition and Food Security Objectives Into Proposed Agriculture Projects: Illustrative Guidance (Beta) helps agriculture project designers build nutrition and food security objectives into their activities. Request a beta version of this guidance by emailing info@iycn.org.

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 emailing info@iycn.org.

For more information, please visit the IYCN website.

The IYCN Project is the flagship project on infant and young child nutrition of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The project is led by PATH and implemented by PATH and three partners: CARE, the Manoff Group, and University Research Co., LLC. For more information, please see the IYCN website.

Posted February 10, 2011.