Improving the Nutrition Impacts of Agriculture Interventions: Strategy and Policy Brief

Written by the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) project, this brief identifies four ways that programming in agricultural value chains is likely to have greater nutritional outcomes:  i) the incremental income is earned or controlled by women, ii) the stream of income is regular or frequent, even if the absolute amounts are small, iii) the income is in-kind (i.e., in the form of food), or iv) training in health and nutrition is provided.  Several guidance questions are offered to assess the context in which they are working and consequently reduce the potential for harm to be created by encouraging cash cropping.  The brief ends with several program recommendations on how agricultural interventions can have better impacts on nutrition, including focusing on working with women; developing staple crop value chains; improving year-round access to food through small-scale agro-processing, crop diversification, and storage and inventory credit schemes; developing and disseminating simple nutrition messages; and selecting complementary indicators to measure the program's impacts.