Advancing Nutrition Programming Globally and Sustainably: What We Learned

By Heather Danton, project director

As USAID Advancing Nutrition prepares to close its doors, we have been doing a lot of thinking about our project’s legacy, that is what we leave behind as we move on. It could be argued that as a five-year, centrally-funded project, using the word legacy—the long-lasting impact of events, actions, etc. that took place in the past, or of a person’s (or project’s) life—is, perhaps, a bit lofty or ill-placed. But lasting impact is exactly what we hoped to achieve both in WHAT we achieved and in HOW we produced it.

From day 1, we were guided by eight principles that established the intention, systems, and plans to target our tools, guidance, reports, technical assistance, learning, and sharing to ensure the value and potential for continued adaptation of our products and approaches. We engaged the intended users of our work, whether that was the dedicated people of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington and around the world, national and local government officials, or community-based organizations, giving voice to their needs and co-creating products and solutions that they, ultimately, will carry on.

As a result, we know now that art from our Infant and Young Child Feeding Image Bank is being adapted and used by organizations in at least 12 countries, including Pakistan, India, Laos, and Vietnam; our efforts to raise awareness of the need for nutrition-sensitive program funding with ministries of health have increased budgets for multi-sectoral nutrition programming; and our social and behavior change tools are being used by organizations in West and East Africa to prioritize behaviors to change, define capacity strengthening activities, and consult with communities about how social norms influence women’s diets.

This approach wasn’t easy. It took time, expertise, patience, outstanding partners, and a commitment to ensuring quality, relevance, and responsiveness to a range of local contexts and capacities. It also required our team to consider how to manage and present information from planning and design through implementation and dissemination. Our desired result was to make multi-sectoral nutrition knowledge, practice, and learning accessible to all. And our numbers reflect our success:

• Our knowledge management platform hosts more than 2,600 nutrition-related resources from USAID and global nutrition partners. This includes 14 tailored web-based tools focused on filling gaps in the knowledge base around both established and emerging programming, from disability and feeding difficulty, adolescent nutrition, and nurturing care to anemia, improving diets through food systems, emergency nutrition, and much more.
• Our global reach spanned multiple platforms, tailoring information to meet different users’ needs, from social media, webinars, workshops to expert consultations, and a bi-monthly Multi-Sectoral Nutrition Resource Review reaching over 19,931 subscribers. Over the life of the project, we hosted over 915 evidence-sharing events with over 35,000 participants from around the world.
• Our research resulted in a new approach to estimating micronutrient deficiencies, leading to both better understanding and replicable results. We helped fill critical gaps in the multi-sectoral nutrition evidence base, publishing 45 peer-reviewed papers in leading academic journals, some of which are now available on our website.
• The USAID Advancing Nutrition website has had over 149,783 total downloads and we engaged over 8,500 X (formerly Twitter) and 13,209 LinkedIn followers with timely resources and perspectives on our approach in different contexts and technical areas. Our website also tells the project’s story through our global work as well as the impact of each one of our 12 country programs so future nutrition implementers can build on and learn from our experience.

USAID Advancing Nutrition accomplished a lot in just five years! And, notably, these achievements came at a time when nutrition was affected by a global pandemic, social unrest and conflict.

We reflected on the breadth and depth of our five years of effort through a series of learning and sharing events in our countries of implementation as well as an in-person gathering in Washington, D.C. Our global learning event highlighted where and how we advanced significant areas of work critical to sustaining impact for nutrition:

• Mother and child-centered nutrition service delivery: We collaborated with a wide range of partners to better integrate components of nurturing care into services to improve their quality and better tailor services.
• Healthy diets: We produced tools, guidance, interactive resources, and curricula to help USAID and partners apply a food systems approach when programming to promote healthy diets.
• Nutrition governance: Our country-based work enhanced government commitment and structures to multi-sectoral nutrition.
• Social and behavior change: We developed a suite of tools to design, deliver, and measure nutrition-related behaviors and social norm change and define and test approaches in humanitarian contexts.
• Localization: Through multi-year partnerships, we strengthened the technical, operational, and functional capacities of local organizations and networks to improve nutrition outcomes.
• Nutrition in humanitarian contexts: We developed resources, guides, and tools to support quality nutrition program implementation in emergency and non-emergency contexts.
• Anemia and micronutrient malnutrition: We collaborated with global experts to address key gaps in evidence and practice on the global impact of micronutrient deficiencies, designing context-specific anemia interventions, and accurately measuring the prevalence of anemia.
• Collaborating, convening, and sharing: We brought together key stakeholders to share, debate, and learn to strengthen evidence, inform better practice, and advocate for change in policies, programs, and strategies on growth monitoring and promotion, feeding difficulties and disabilities, and improving nutrition content in pre-service curricula, among others.

I hope you will use our tools, reports, and research and adapt our approaches from the wide variety of interventions undertaken in Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, East Africa, Ghana, Honduras, Kenya, the Kyrgyz Republic, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. But more than that, I hope you will continue our legacy of partnership, learning, and localization. Improving nutrition in communities, in countries, and around the world is not something that any one project or organization can do alone. In fact, the relevance, quality, and validity of our outcomes stemmed in part from how we approached our work, as we—

• prioritized localization from the outset by working alongside local partners to design, implement, and collaborate toward shared objectives
• built partnerships with and engaged a range of stakeholders, from academics to community-based organizations
• built on existing evidence and looked beyond the usual experts to engage local thought leaders and elevate local knowledge, communities, and private sector actors
• established diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility principles early on and applied them to all aspects of work, including human resources, technical assistance and capacity strengthening, knowledge management and communications, and research.

Each and every one of us must continue to do our part. The USAID Advancing Nutrition team wants to thank and commend USAID for continuing to prioritize multi-sectoral nutrition programming, learning, and research and for maintaining the legacy that emerged from our shared efforts.

See more life of project highlights.