Nutrition-sensitive agriculture to address malnutrition: USAID in Assam, India

Food insecurity and malnutrition are deeply linked - especially in the context of a changing world where conflict, climate calamities, health epidemics, economic shocks, and inequalities are on the rise. These factors have, of many things, also contributed to an increase in food insecurity. Global data indicates that approximately 3.1 billion people were unable to access safe, nutritious, and sufficient food in 2021. 

In the aftermath of the pandemic, multiple organisations came forward to work closely with government and other stakeholders to better understand the food security environment and to support interventions which would give insight and feed into context driven programming. USAID Advancing nutrition is one such important player creating footprints in the area of food security and nutrition. Their website offers some interesting resources from their recent initiatives in the state of Assam. This initiative was targeting socio-economically disadvantaged families and was planned with the objective of creating knowledge exchange platforms for nutrition-sensitive agriculture to address malnutrition. 

In this week’s issue of Poshan Weekly, we are happy to share some important freely available resources (on USAID’s website) which highlight the learnings and good practises from this project.

While the main resources in this issue are based on a project spanning across 3 districts of Assam; the additional resources also spotlight some nutrition related work in Uttar Pradesh and Odisha.  We hope that this issue of Poshan Weekly can help you understand good practises on such convergent activities while also giving you some food for thought.