Food security, health and nutrition

Learning note

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This Note relates to KSF2: Poverty, social development and targeting
Version: January 2008

Core issues

• Project design documentation should include an analysis of food insecurity, hunger/malnutrition, and the burden of disease which should be based on:
  • Basic evidence (from secondary sources) and analysis of the significance (serious concern / concern / not a concern) and causes (e.g. access to services, current policies) of:
• food insecurity, including duration of hungry season, sufficiency of household food stores;
  malnutrition, including the prevalence of chronic and acute malnutrition among children aged less than five years;
• burden of disease, including life expectancy, infant mortality and the relative importance of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, etc.
• Examination of any red flag values (for example, chronic malnutrition higher than 30% or adult prevalence of HIV greater than 5%).
• Discussion of any expressed priorities of community members concerning food security, health and nutrition, with documented methodology (such as amount of time spent in how many villages, number of focus groups with ♀/♂) sufficiently robust to justify any conclusions reached.
• The scale and costing of project components should respond to the significant concerns drawn from the above evidence and the priorities expressed by communities.
• When any significant concerns are not addressed by the IFAD project, evidence should be given that the government, other agencies, NGOs, etc. are adequately addressing these concern(s).
• Potential threats to public health attributable to project activities (for example, increased risk of malaria and schistosomiasis associated with irrigation) should be acknowledged in the design, and appropriate mitigation efforts proposed and costed as necessary.

Key tasks for design and review

• Ensure that the poverty/vulnerability analyses:
  • generate meaningful analyses of food insecurity, malnutrition and the burden of disease;
  • document qualitative methodology for determining community priorities, ensuring the findings are connected to project components.

• Include appropriate considerations for implementation where the following sub-components are part of project design:
  • Clinic Facilities:
• incorporate adequate provisions for clinic maintenance, re-supply and outreach;
• ensure government agreement to staff clinics with necessary personnel.
  • Information, Education and Communication (IEC):
• specify messages and channels of communication to be used; ensure they are adapted to the needs of the project area and its people (such as use of traditional communicators, and rural radio in local language).
  • Community-based Workers: 
• specify selection criteria, realistic workloads and gender balance for community workers;
• ensure planned training is sufficient and includes periodic refresher training;
• include provisions for motivating community workers in the long term.

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