Supporting Program Design through Research on Agriculture-to-Nutrition Linkages
The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Nutrition pursues rigorous research that supports the goals of USAID’s Feed the Future initiative, while also building human and institutional capacity for analysis and policy formulation in developing countries.
The goals of the meeting were to bring together all our partners and collaborators to:
- Learn and synthesize findings across the different focus countries thus taking stock of the completed and ongoing research.
- Understand how these contribute to our shared research agenda and how these inform policy and programming within the context of USAID as well as globally at large
- Understand how our findings support practice and what needs to be done to better link research to practice as well as identify research gaps for future consideration
The sessions and structure of the meeting was to primarily focus on four domains:
- Evidence around agriculture to nutrition linkages, including pathways to resilience
- Innovations (agricultural value chain technologies, metrics and indicators)
- Institutional and Individual Capacity Building
- Research Gaps and Challenges to inform future directions
Global Research Framework and Objectives
The Nutrition Innovation Lab focuses on three major over-arching research questions:
Nutrition-to-Agriculture Linkages
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In what ways do investments in agriculture achieve significant measurable impacts in nutrition?
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What are the type of metrics that will be critical to assess resilience within the agriculture to nutrition continuum?
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As a corollary, can pathways to impact be empirically demonstrated?
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How can large-scale programs best incorporate such knowledge into cost-effective multi-sectoral interventions aimed at improving nutrition?
Program and Policy Processes
- How can policy and program implementation processes be enhanced to support both nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive actions?
Neglected Biological Mechanisms in the agriculture to nutrition continuum
- What are the major contributors/risk factors linked to pregnancy and early life, to infant and young nutrition outcomes focusing on issues related to WASH, water quality, aflatoxins, gut microbiota and environmental enteropathy, and animal source protein availability?
These three overarching questions form the framework for a host of nested studies that are generating concrete evidence that responds to priority developing country concerns while supporting the goals of USAID’s Feed the Future initiative. The research was pursued in ways to enhance policymaker’s understanding of how to overcome constraints in policy and program design and implementation and produce global public goods in the form of new scientific knowledge of relevant and diverse settings.
Title | Speaker | Format |
A novel method to measure resilience in nutrition: Application to diets of rural women and children in Nepal and Bangladesh | Sonia Zaharia | |
Affordability of nutritious diets in Malawi, Tanzania, Ethiopia and worldwide | William Masters | |
Altitude and Child Linear Growth in Nepal | Gerald Shively | |
Assessing maternal environmental enteric dysfunction and its association with adverse birth outcomes in Uganda. | Jacqueline Lauer | |
Assessing mycotoxin exposure (examples from Nepal and Mozambique) Rationale, design, accomplishments, challenges | Shibani Ghosh | |
Bangladesh aquaculture and horticulture for nutrition study: Rationale, design, accomplishments and challenges | Patrick Webb | |
Building capacity in Uganda -Supporting Ugandan students and professionals in Nutrition- Agriculture research for development | Edgar Agaba | |
Chronic Aflatoxin Exposure and Risk of Growth Impairment During the First 1000 Days: A Birth Cohort Study in Banke, Nepal | Johanna Andrews Trevino | |
Development and Validation of Methods for Detection of Aflatoxin-Lysine Adduct in Dried Blood Spot Samples | Jia-Sheng Wang | |
Diet diversity during pregnancy and infant growth outcomes in Uganda | Isabel Madzorera | |
Drivers of Diet Complexity in Nepal | Gerald Shively Alecia Evans |
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Effectiveness Of Integrated Agriculture, Health & Nutrition Interventions To Improve Maternal And Child Nutrition & Health In Rural Uganda | Bernard Bashaasha | |
Evaluation of the USAID Community Connector Program | Nassul Kabunga | |
Leveraging agriculture for nutrition impacts | Patrick Webb | |
Nutrition Capacity Development in Malawi: update on activities | Agnes Mwangwela | |
Nutrition Sensitive Programming: HKI Experience From The Field -SBC, IYCF and Child Development | Dale Davis | |
Nutritional Resilience Following The 2015 Earthquake In Nepal | Andrew Thorne-Lyman | |
PoSHAN Community Studies in Nepal Rationale, Design, Achievements and Lessons | Keith West | |
SAFE-PHONE: Smartphone-based Aflatoxin Evaluation at the Point-of-Need | Saurabh Mehta | |
Vitamin B-12 status in infancy is positively associated with development and cognitive functioning 5 y later in Nepalese children | Ingrid Kvestad |