Given the impact malnutrition has on health, productivity, and development, USAID requested USAID Advancing Nutrition’s support in developing a course to orient staff to how USAID speaks about nutrition, build nutrition literacy, and increase understanding of how to operationalize and fund key interventions. To reflect the multidisciplinary nature of nutrition, we designed this course for participants with a range of technical expertise and across bureaus. This could include new staff, those who recently transitioned to different positions or teams integrating nutrition, as well as experienced staff in need of a refresher. Ultimately, the course aims to better equip staff to design, implement, and monitor high-quality multi-sectoral nutrition programs.

USAID Advancing Nutrition collaborated with USAID to develop course materials, including a facilitator’s guide, slide decks, and participant handouts. The course is designed to be interactive and flexible—it is broken into four 3–4 hour modules that can be delivered separately or together depending on participants’ needs. The four modules provides an introduction to—

• global nutrition and the problem of malnutrition
  • why nutrition is important for global development
  • understanding malnutrition
  • healthy diets
• USAID approaches to improve global nutrition
  • overview of USAID’s approach
  • types of nutrition interventions
  • quality SBC
  • nutrition relevant systems
• USAID’s institutional structure and approach for nutrition
  • nutrition architecture at USAID
  • three bureaus
  • guiding strategies and frameworks
  • operationalizing and funding USAID’s approach to nutrition
• bureau-specific strategic approaches and integrative nutrition programming
  • USAID background and country context for programming
  • case study application: Mozambique.

In summer 2022, we piloted the course with 18 participants with a range of experience in nutrition programming. The course was well received by participants, who particularly appreciated the opportunity to discuss the range of nutrition programming across countries and regions. In the last year of the project, we are planning to revise the course materials based on the findings from the pilot and deliver the course again in spring 2023 before transitioning it to another USAID mechanism for future implementation.