Our work in capacity strengthening was founded in a competency-based approach. Identifying and using relevant competencies is the starting point for designing activities to assess, develop and evaluate essential skills for multi-sectoral nutrition.
Through our work, USAID Advancing Nutrition has developed several resources for understanding multi-sectoral nutrition competencies and applying them to specific contexts.
Identification and use of competencies: To help implementers deepen their understanding of how to effectively use competency lists, we created a brief on what competencies are and how to use them. We hosted a series of three webinars that describe how to use competencies to assess, develop, and evaluate skills that included examples from across USAID Advancing Nutrition’s diverse country programs.
SBC competencies: We created two competency lists that focus on outlining relevant social and behavior change skills: 52 SBC competencies for program staff and 38 SBC competencies for community health workers. In addition, we outlined and tested a comprehensive approach for assessing SBC competencies among USAID’s Resilience Food Security Activities.
Multi-sectoral nutrition competencies for nurses: We created several resources to identify relevant nutrition competencies for nurses and similar cadres, to support writing of job descriptions, designing both pre-service and in-service training, and other forms of skills development. We discussed application of these competencies and shared examples from our program through a well-attended webinar.
