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Benoist Veillerette, a senior economist with FAO's Investment Centre, talks about the push to make investment in agriculture and rural development more effective on nutrition.

What role can the Investment Centre play in enhancing nutrition?

A few years ago FAO developed a strategy for mainstreaming nutrition in the Organization's work. The Investment Centre contributed to the strategy and now has an important role in implementing it. Our work covers a broad range of investment, not just in agriculture, but rural infrastructure, irrigation, natural resources management, rural livelihoods, poverty alleviation, etc., and there's always potential to improve nutrition outcomes.

The Investment Centre help countries leverage millions, even billions, of dollars of investments so making those investments more nutrition-sensitive can have a big impact. We’ve been advocating for nutrition-sensitive investment for about four years now because the challenge is to convince those designing investment projects that nutrition matters and that it can complement not distract from the core investment work. The idea is to develop simple tools to make our investments more effective on nutrition.

What is being done?

Initially our work was about raising awareness among colleagues. The big question now is how to do it. We're not talking about converting investment projects and programmes into nutrition projects or programmes, but rather introducing nutrition considerations into the design. 

We've worked with the Nutrition Division to develop tools, like the checklist, which is basically a set of questions to ask at the design stage that can guide choices and targeting. When you understand who the most food- and nutrition-insecure people are, for example, you can include activities or choose certain value chains that would contribute to improving their nutrition. The checklist also provides practical and useful references.

Another tool is what we call an indicators compendium. Our nutrition colleagues are researchers and often want a project to encompass everything under the sky. But when you work on an investment project, which is not a nutrition project, you have to introduce simple, easily attainable nutrition indicators.

Can you give examples of nutrition-sensitive investment?

You have to start somewhere and be creative, looking for entry points to introduce nutrition issues.

The World Bank, with whom we partner to design investment projects, is very vocal about embedding nutrition in all their investment projects. In Bhutan, the World Bank is supporting the government to improve agricultural productivity and develop value chains. When it came to designing the proposal, they asked for our help to make sure it covered nutrition. FAO sent Anna-Lisa Noack, a nutrition specialist in the Investment Centre. She looked at how the proposal's design could help produce better nutrition outcomes, from choosing the right value chains to working with relevant institutions and building on local food preferences. She also proposed adding complementary activities, including one to link local vegetable production with school feeding programmes, and another to raise awareness on how to diversify diets based on locally available nutrient-rich food. 

Another example is related to the World Bank's portfolio in India. FAO was asked to undertake the final evaluation of an irrigation project, which didn't focus on nutrition at all. But when we did the implementation completion and results report, we proposed that an additional colleague join our team to see if the project had contributed to improving nutrition, and also to identify good entry points for follow-up projects. We're also starting to work with the Government of India and the Bank's large-scale programmes on rural livelihood development, community-based poverty reduction, women's groups, etc., to see how best to bring in nutrition.

We organized a joint four-day training last year in IFAD to raise awareness on how to make IFAD's portfolio more nutrition-sensitive on the basis of a review of some case studies.

Our colleagues in the Nutrition Division have worked closely with CAADP/NEPAD on mainstreaming nutrition into CAADP investment plans. Together we participated in three large regional workshops in Africa, bringing in delegations from each country to review their national agricultural investment plans and identify ways to incorporate nutrition. Beginning early next year, a new generation of national agricultural investment plans will focus more on food security and nutrition in Africa.

What's next?

We need to gather more evidence on approaches that are effective and those that aren't. It's too early to assess the impact of our own work, but we can look at the results of other projects, usually small-scale, that did introduce nutrition years ago, and scale up what worked well through larger investment programmes.

We also need to make sure this is not some trend or fashion in FAO that will disappear in a few years. It needs to be a joint effort with the countries − a process owned and driven by them. The good news is that several countries have realized the need to do more on nutrition and are joining the SUN movement and contributing to the ICN2. The high-level political commitment is there. The challenge is to make sure those who design the programmes and projects are also convinced and have the necessary capacities and tools.

There is some concern that the pressure to make investments more nutrition-sensitive, gender-sensitive, climate-smart and so on is just adding layers of complication. But I think we need to change the way we work so that we integrate these elements naturally. The Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems, which were approved by the Committee on Food Security last year, should guide our work because they gather all of these things into one approach.  

A training session for Investment Centre colleagues is being held this December to introduce these tools and also to take stock of some of the work being done in various countries.