USAID Advancing Nutrition develops, curates, packages, and shares multi-sectoral nutrition knowledge to help you stay on top of developments and evidence in global nutrition programming.
Adolescents have been neglected in national and global nutrition plans and policies. This series highlights the effect of nutrition on adolescent growth and development, the role of the food environment on food choices, and strategies and interventions that may lead to healthy nutrition and growth.
Integrating Early Detection and Treatment of Child Wasting into Routine Primary Health Care Services
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Nutrition and Health Systems
Rapidly scaling wasting services and achieving the wasting Sustainable Development Goals target requires integrating wasting treatment into primary health care services.
Growth Monitoring and Promotion in Northern Ghana: A Case Study Narrative
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Nutrition and Health SystemsGrowth Monitoring and Promotion
Growth monitoring and promotion (GMP) is a common platform for delivering child health and nutrition services. This report highlights findings, challenges, good practices, and innovations that stakeholders can use to foster healthy child growth and development.
Field Exchange Special Issue on Nutrition of School-Age Children and Adolescents
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Nutrition and Health SystemsAdolescent NutritionCOVID-19
Developing international targets and goals and systematically tracking nutrition and mortality data are critical to assess the burden of malnutrition, monitor trends, prioritize interventions, advocate with governments, and assess programming efficacy.
Conducting Formative Research on Adolescent Nutrition: Key Considerations
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Nutrition and Health SystemsAdolescent Nutrition
Involving adolescents in designing programs and efforts to inform policy allows them to make decisions about their own well-being and ensures the applicability of results in communities. This guidance includes a list of participatory nutrition research methods and pretesting resources.
Best Practices for Conducting a Remote Data Quality Assessment
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Monitoring, Evaluation, and LearningCOVID-19Growth Monitoring and Promotion
Using a remote data quality assessment approach facilitates routine monitoring in emergency settings or when travel is not possible. Remote approaches also protect the health and safety of service providers, government staff, data collectors, and supervisors.
A Global Call to Action for Gender-Inclusive Data Collection and Use
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Monitoring, Evaluation, and LearningGender
Binary representation of cisgender female and male populations perpetuates marginalization and discrimination of transgender and gender-nonconforming people and limits the ability to serve the needs of all. Authors call for a shift to using multinomial gender-disaggregation, particularly for surveyors, researchers, program implementers, policy makers, and gender rights advocates.
Household-Level Consumption Data can be Redistributed for Individual-Level Optifood Diet Modeling: Analysis from Four Countries
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Monitoring, Evaluation, and LearningBreastfeedingGrowth Monitoring and Promotion
Results suggest that household consumption and expenditure surveys data can be used in Optifood analyses of dietary patterns and micronutrient gaps for 12- to 23-month-old children in place of individual-level 24-hour recalls. Further analyses are required for different age groups and locations.
Health Chat Featuring USAID Chief Nutritionist Shawn Baker
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Knowledge ManagementAdolescent NutritionBreastfeedingCOVID-19Emergency NutritionFood SecurityInfant and Young Child Nutrition (IYCN)Maternal NutritionMicronutrient InterventionsNutrition Sensitive AgriculturePrivate-Sector Engagement
Increased investments to offset the consequences of COVID-19, expand social safety nets, and protect access to nutrition services, nutritious foods, and vitamin and mineral supplementation are critical. USAID’s Shawn Baker discusses the importance of closing financing gaps for private-sector engagement in the nutrition sector, and both stabilizing and reforming food systems for nutrition.
Reducing Child Undernutrition: Lessons from International Development
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Knowledge ManagementAdolescent Nutrition
Speakers discuss multi-sectoral interventions, the role of institutional strengthening to address undernutrition at national and subnational levels, how nutrition interventions can better support social norms and behavior change, and how development agencies and partner governments can use these lessons to improve nutrition programming. This is a webinar.
The summit focused on women’s rights to health and nutrition and new and transformative thinking, investments, and actions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals on nutrition and gender equality. This is a webinar. The recording is available in English, French, and Spanish.
Speakers from multiple sectors discuss the latest thinking, research, and experiences on designing and launching mechanisms to diversify nutrition funding. This is a webinar.
U.S. Government Global Nutrition Coordination Plan 2021–2026
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Knowledge ManagementAdolescent NutritionCOVID-19Food SafetyFood SecurityInfant and Young Child Nutrition (IYCN)Maternal NutritionMicronutrient Interventions
This interagency effort works to strengthen the impact of diverse nutrition investments across the government through better communication and collaboration and by linking research to program implementation.
USAID Maternal Nutrition: Preventing Malnutrition in Women and Girls
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Knowledge ManagementAdolescent NutritionBreastfeedingFood SecurityInfant and Young Child Nutrition (IYCN)Maternal Nutrition
Women and girls have unique nutritional requirements throughout the life cycle, especially during adolescence, before and during pregnancy, and while breastfeeding. USAID investments seek to protect nutrition throughout the life cycle to ensure that all women and children are well-nourished and can live healthy and productive lives. This is a video.
USAID and its partners work with countries to provide people with skills, tools, and resources to improve their families’ health, diets, and nutrition, especially early in life. This is a video.
The “best-fit” framework focuses on extension service characteristics that affect performance, including governance structures and funding, organizational and management capacities and cultures, methods, and community engagement. All of these are affected by the policy environment, agroecological conditions, and farming-system heterogeneity.
Africa Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition
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Knowledge ManagementCOVID-19Food SecurityInfant and Young Child Nutrition (IYCN)Maternal NutritionMicronutrient Interventions
Increasing numbers of Africans experience hunger and suffer widespread micronutrient deficiencies; overweight and obesity are significant public health concerns as well. A common vision, strong political leadership, and effective cross-sectoral collaboration, are essential to identify and implement sustainable solutions that transform agrifood systems to deliver healthy, affordable diets.
Unleashing the Full Power of Large-Scale Food Fortification: A Renewed Commitment
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Food SystemsMicronutrient Interventions
While large-scale food fortification has a record of nearly eliminating debilitating vitamin and mineral deficiencies, it is underused in ending preventable diseases and death. Speakers discuss new efforts to accelerate progress and catalyze momentum and proof-of-impact through targeted investment and political leadership. This is a webinar.
Food Safety: A Foundation for Nutrition and Growth
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Food SystemsFood Safety
Speakers discuss the multi-sectoral requirements to keep food safe, with a focus on the informal markets where consumers source their diets. They discuss specific causal pathways in health and physiology, consumer behavior, supply chains and markets, and policy and regulation domains through which food safety and nutrition are linked.