Since 2019, USAID Advancing Nutrition has supported nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive policies, programs, interventions, and systems to realize our vision of a world where countries, communities, and families are well nourished, resilient, and able to thrive. At a time when more than 45 million children under 5 are wasted and 571 million women and girls of reproductive age are anemic, we are committed to helping USAID answer the call for change by supporting its strategies for multi-sectoral nutrition and global food security. Explore this page and download our Year 3 in Review to learn more.
Download Year in Review Report (PDF, 2.7MB)
Expanding Country Presence
USAID Advancing Nutrition works globally and locally, in 12 countries and regions, to design, implement, and evaluate programs that strengthen local capacity and support behavior change to strengthen the enabling environment for better nutrition. This year, the project launched seven new country programs, offering greater opportunity for local implementation, whether through research, collaboration, and coordination support to country governments, or the development and testing of national or global guidelines and tools, and an opportunity to learn and share what works in different contexts across countries.
Sharing Knowledge and Strengthening Capacity
The project’s third year brought significant growth that helped accelerate our work toward USAID’s nutrition Priorities. We convened experts to build consensus around measuring nutrition progress, provided a platform to share learning and experience across countries, and partnered with local nutrition stakeholders to strengthen capacity to sustain improved nutrition outcomes.
Aligning Multi-sectoral Nutrition Priorities
Four shared technical areas of work emerged across our team portfolios that align with USAID’s priorities for nutrition globally: micronutrients, infant and young child feeding, healthy diets, and wasting prevention and management. Our work cuts across critical stages in the nutrition life cycle.
Key Accomplishments
- Methods, Tools, and Metrics for Evaluating Market Food Environments in Low- and Middle-Income Countries compiles tools to assist implementing partners and programmers in monitoring and evaluating the range of factors that influence food access and food choices.
- Social and Behavior Change Resources for Women’s Healthy Diets explores gaps in existing SBC resources and makes recommendations for future research and resource development.
- The Modality Decision Tool Nutrition Addendum aids implementing partners in applying a nutrition lens to the selection of appropriate food assistance modalities (cash, vouchers, or in-kind) for the nutritionally vulnerable.
- The Responsive Care and Early Learning Addendum includes a planning, adaptation, and implementation guide; facilitator’s guide; counseling cards, counselor’s resource packet, and training aid for use by infant and young child feeding programmers.
- The Enabling Better Complementary Feeding: Guidance and Workbook highlights challenges and examples of quality social and behavior change for improving complementary feeding for use by nutrition and SBC programmers and practitioners.
- Our breastfeeding-related research identified ways to protect, promote, and support breastfeeding, including strengthening commitments to the nine national Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative responsibilities to ensure that mothers and newborns receive appropriate and timely care at all health facilities.
- Facilitated discussions across USAID operating units to define and share USAID’s comparative advantage in wasting management across the continuum of care in development and humanitarian contexts.
- Facilitated development of health zone-level coordination and collaboration action plans for management of wasting in two provinces (Kasai Oriental and Sud Kivu) of the Democratic Republic of Congo and summarized learning to support continued improvements in coordination and collaboration between development and emergency actors.
- The two-country case study on how to strengthen and harmonize key elements of growth monitoring and promotion (GMP) informs wasting management, as improved and expanded use of GMP will help to identify and ensure early treatment.
- The Anemia Toolkit provides public health practitioners and policymakers with resources pertaining to anemia causation and its assessment, and presents tools for strategic intervention, and needs for further investigation.
- Research modeled food fortification contributions in Malawi and compared cost and cost-efficiency of micronutrient powder delivery in rural Uganda.