USAID Advancing Nutrition is supporting USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) International Food Relief Partnership (IFRP) to improve the design and implementation of small- and medium-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplement (LNS-SQ and LNS-MQ) programs.

Strong evidence shows that preventive LNS improves survival, growth, and development of children 6-24 months of age. However, BHA noted that IFRP partners, many of whom may be new to nutrition programming, could improve the quality of their program implementation to achieve measurable nutrition outcomes.

Therefore, to increase BHA/IFRP’s understanding of how to better support partners, USAID Advancing Nutrition conducted a remote mapping exercise of all LNS partners to compare program details and identify gaps and opportunities for capacity strengthening.

We used a mixed-methods approach (online survey and follow-up interviews) to gather information from partners. The survey captured information on program implementation and design, and directly asked partners where they needed support. The interviews focused on program implementation experiences, including how partners adapted to challenges.

The findings from this activity will assist BHA/IFRP in offering appropriate capacity strengthening support to partners programming LNS.