World Nutrition Day 2024: A letter to project designers

Editor’s note: This blog post was published in partnership with the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

Dear project designer,

I’m writing to inform you that your project may have an impact on nutrition, like it or not. You might be asking yourself, “How could that be possible? I have never once discussed nutrition, food or anything like that when designing my project.”

But since nutrition is foundational for development and is intricately linked to all aspects of growth and function in humans, your project likely has a link, too.

Does your energy project provide access to electricity and therefore allow improved food storage and preservation, enabling families to eat a more nutritious diet year-round? Does your climate change mitigation project reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve resiliency to shocks that threaten food security and nutrition? Does your agriculture project support food processing and packaging facilities, leading to increased availability of fortified foods?

Please, project designer, consider incorporating nutrition benefits when projecting poverty reduction and calculating your project’s economic rate of return. When interventions are intentionally designed to improve nutrition or mitigate negative impacts on nutrition, the economic and poverty-reduction impact can be significant.

Implement reforms to ensure women benefit from your education program and reduce child chronic malnutrition. Provide farmers using irrigation with nutrition-focused social and behavior change and improve dietary diversity. Construct a road that targets the transport of perishable items like fruits and vegetables and reduces post-harvest losses.

Beware, project designer, if you’ve designed your project without thought for the impact it’s having on nutrition, your project may have negative unintended consequences on nutrition. A new road may increase agricultural commodities transport, leading to more nutritious products going to distant markets and reducing consumption at home. Increased incomes may lead to increased consumption of low-nutrient, processed foods leading to overweight and obesity and associated chronic diseases. A processing plant can contribute to environmental pollution and contaminate air, water and soil.

But before you let these thoughts overwhelm you, know there is hope! We have developed the Nutrition Toolkit to support teams at the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and others in international development, and to shed light on a systems approach to project design. This approach ensures that interventions across sectors that can improve nutrition do just that.

Three guiding principles across the toolkit tie into this approach:

1. Involve individuals with nutrition expertise and include data and evidence on the determinants of nutrition outcomes early in the project design and compact development process.
2. Add an explicit nutrition objective, where relevant, as a signal for project implementers to continue to maximize nutrition impact throughout the investment lifecycle. The objectives should be linked to specific short- and medium-term outcomes (e.g., maternal and child dietary diversity, exclusive breastfeeding, consumption of fortified food vehicles, etc.) that are incorporated in the monitoring and evaluation plan.
3. Use an impact pathway approach, building on existing evidence, to help identify different program entry points across all sectors that can play a role in improving nutrition status.

We encourage you to look at this toolkit to understand how you can better design nutrition-sensitive and specific interventions that can contribute to both economic growth and improved nutrition. The toolkit provides the rationale for investing in nutrition, how specific education, water sanitation and hygiene, and especially agriculture projects could do a better job of “seeing” nutrition effects. The toolkit also provides guidance on how to monitor your project and calculate the economic rate of return.

On World Nutrition Day 2024, we hope you’ll join us and become nutrition-aware to design better projects that will improve nutrition intentionally while reducing poverty through economic growth.

Sincerely,
R4D and MCC Nutrition Champions