Enhancing nutrition in emergency and resilience agriculture responses to prevent child acute malnutrition

While life-saving interventions address the immediate causes of child acute malnutrition, they often fail to address underlying livelihood needs. This initiative seeks to leverage FAO’s capacity to build the resilience of the most vulnerable communities by bridging short-term humanitarian assistance with prevention-focused development activities.

This initiative is part of the UN Global Action Plan on Child Wasting and is implemented in collaboration with UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO. Country offices lead implementation efforts, with technical support from academia, such as Tufts University. Community engagement is systematized through mechanisms like Dimitra Clubs, which empower gender-inclusive participatory decision-making to enhance nutrition and resilience in agriculture responses.

• Households with at-risk children, pregnant and lactating women and girls 
• Country implementing teams 
• Nutrition focal points from Governments
• UN agencies and development partners

• Coordination: Collaborate with UN agencies for joint targeting and co-location of multisystem services to complement FAO's agrifood system focus.
• Provision of Resources: Supply inputs/cash, alongside capacity development for improved food safety, storage, preservation and minimal processing.
• Evidence Building: Enhance the Project Activity Information Database (PAID) with protocols to collect operational evidence on how interventions contribute to the prevention of child acute malnutrition.

In December 2022, FAO launched its child wasting prevention action plan (2023–2024) to accelerate efforts in 15 high-burden countries. Since then, more programmes have integrated nutrition into emergency and resilience agriculture responses. An increasing number of countries now implement "resilience packages," which include seeds for nutritious crops, emergency animal feed, and food and nutrition education. There is a better overall understanding on how nutrition can be integrated into emergency and resilience agriculture responses. 

Through integrated Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning we aim to generate more operational evidence on how agrifood system interventions contribute to the prevention of child acute malnutrition in different contexts. We aim to identify bottom up solutions that can be adapted and integrated in larger programmes. 

This is already part of a plan that covers 15 countries characterized by high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition. The aim is to ensure that preventive strategies for child acute malnutrition are complementing life-saving interventions by building the resilience of the most vulnerable households while fostering household livelihoods. 

More countries are willing to join the UN Global Action Plan on Child Wasting. FAO has a leading role to play to ensure that agrifood systems are considered in the development of country roadmaps against child wasting. This initiative can bridge the divide between short-term humanitarian assistance and prevention-focused development activities.     One of the key lessons learned is that there are many interventions/programmes targeting vulnerable communities with potential for enhancing nutrition. But this potential is lost if there is no continuous engagement with the households and broader community. This participatory engagement can be beneficial to address linked issues with gender empowerment and social inclusion.  In addition, monitoring the implementation of activities is not enough to build the evidence on their contribution towards the prevention of child acute malnutrition. This requires conducting operational research, which would need additional funding and capacity.