Nutrition programs tend to focus on mothers and overlook how other family members influence nutrition and caregiving during pregnancy and early childhood. There is considerable evidence that other family members, particularly fathers and grandmothers, have significant influence on food access, intra-household distribution of food, child feeding, and ultimately, over maternal nutrition and infant and young child feeding practices.

USAID Advancing Nutrition seeks to understand global programmatic experiences engaging family members in addition to mothers (such as grandmothers, fathers, and others) to improve maternal, child, and adolescent nutrition through an online survey. This survey follows literature reviews of interventions that engaged family members to improve nutrition and a webinar on the same topic. The goal is to understand and document the diverse program experiences not fully captured in the published literature. Survey results will be summarized and published with the aim of highlighting lessons learned and recommendations for other practitioners. This survey will also help to identify interest in a virtual Community of Practice.

We invite you to share your experiences designing, implementing, or evaluating nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions/activities that involve any members of the family system. The survey should take around 20 minutes, and you will have the option to save your responses and return later. All responses are requested by April 1, 2021. Your responses to the survey questions will be confidential, but if you are willing to share specific reports or other materials about your activities, there will be a place to share them. If you have any questions about the survey, please contact Kate Litvin, Technical Specialist on Nutrition and Gender, USAID Advancing Nutrition, at kate_litvin@jsi.com.