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FAO is committed to preventing all forms of malnutrition, a prevailing threat to development and wellbeing. Reducing sustained rates of malnutrition requires joint-action between health, agriculture, social protection, and education sectors. Evidence suggests that the health sector, through nutrition-specific interventions- will only make up 20% of the efforts needed to reduce the burden of malnutrition.

While these sectors must clearly collaborate, the impact pathways from production, social protection and natural resource management to dietary intake, care practices and health are long and differ significantly between regions, socio-economic groups, and within households. As such, it is important to identify ways to measure what difference ‘nutrition-sensitive’ interventions are making and how these can be improved. To identify some of these relevant interventions and their appropriate indicators, FAO recently launched a Compendium of Indicators for Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture.   

The compendium aims to support those responsible for designing nutrition-sensitive food and agricultural investments to select appropriate indicators to measure if, and through which pathways, investments are contributing to improved nutrition.  It features a list of indicators, including a description of what each indicator measures, when it is relevant to use, how it is collected and analyzed and related technical resources.

It is the product of extensive collaboration between FAO’s Nutrition and Food Systems Division, Statistics Division and Investment Centre. The authors are Anna Herforth (FAO), Giorgia F. Nicolò (FAO), Benoist Veillerette (FAO) and Charlotte Dufour (FAO). Anna-Lisa Noack (FAO) and Sophia Lyamouri (FAO) extensively contributed to developing the output, drawing on field experience in design and implementation support. This piece of work contributes to FAO’s first strategic program dedicated to the eradication of hunger and malnutrition 

‘Nutrition sensitive programming is not just a fleeting development agenda but rather a renewed call to address the crux of people’s food and livelihood needs by placing individuals at the center of the food system’ said Anna Lisa Noack, a nutrition-sensitive investment specialist in FAO’s Investment Centre

International commitment

Today, 1 in 3 people are malnourished- either suffering from inadequate intake of nutrients or on the other hand, consuming excessive quantities of poor quality foods. Malnutrition costs governments trillions of dollars in healthcare costs and loss of economic productivity each year – and no country is untouched.

2016 marks the beginning of the Decade of Action on Nutrition, following the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2), which was hosted two years earlier by FAO and World Health Organization where Member states reaffirmed their commitment to address all forms of malnutrition – stunting, wasting, micronutrient deficiencies, obesity – by adopting the Rome Declaration on Nutrition and its Framework for Action 

The Framework of Action underscores the importance of making policies and investments in agricultural development and food systems more nutrition-sensitive.

“Many of our development partners, such as the World Bank and IFAD, have made nutrition a priority,” said Noack. “So we are now working to improve the evidence base and support teams responsible for project design and implementation to select appropriate nutrition-related indicators to monitor how their investments are (positively or negatively) impacting nutrition. Assessing the impact of interventions and drawing on lessons learnt from each experience is the only way to strengthen agriculture-nutrition linkages and avoid repeating mistakes”.

Different pathways

The compendium identifies six outcomes that projects can, and often do contribute to including on-farm availability of diverse and safe foods, market environment including affordable food prices, income generation, women’s empowerment including labor burden and decision-making power, nutrition knowledge and norms that shape the food plate, and lastly, natural resource management practices.

These outcomes, in turn, can influence the more immediate determinants of malnutrition – food access, care practices, and health and sanitation, which ultimately impact diets and the health status of individuals.

“It is easy to measure agriculture productivity, but for a nutrition-sensitive project, it is always important to look as closely as possible at the impacts on the practices at individual and household level, e.g. looking at the linkages between production and consumption” Noack remarked. “Given the areas of responsibility of those implementing projects in these diverse sectors, anthropometric or health indicators will unlikely be measurable nor relevant as sustainable change is often incremental, and the added value of rendering an investment ‘nutrition-sensitive’ is often difficult to capture without intermediate impact indicators” Sophia Lyamouri, Nutrition economist in TCIB added.

Increasing capacity

Lyamouri concluded, “Our next steps are to improve the evidence base, strengthen capacities of planners and designers to incorporate nutrition considerations at all levels, and increase the number of projects seriously looking to improve nutrition”.

The compendium is part of a growing series of FAO guiding documents on nutrition-sensitive agriculture. For more information visit: FAO Nutrition