Sixty percent of new projects designed between 2025 and 2027 are nutrition sensitive

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is committed to addressing the nutrition needs of the rural poor by integrating nutrition in its programme of loans and grants. These include the Country Strategic Opportunities Programmes (COSOPs) in each country and investment projects in agriculture, rural development and more broadly in food systems. Such investments identify clear impact pathways through which they can maximise their contribution to healthy diets and improved nutrition at all stages of food value chains (production, packaging, transporting, distribution, marketing) and by ensuring consumer demand for healthy choices, changes in food consumption patterns and coordination with other sectors and stakeholders.

In order to achieve this commitment, IFAD deploys nutrition and social inclusions specialists to support design teams and governments to mainstream nutrition in new COSOPs and all new projects designed from 2022. This includes building capacity of IFAD staff, consultants and implementing partners on how to mainstream nutrition in IFAD investments and capitalisation of lessons learnt. IFAD’s How To Do Note provides detailed step-by-step guidance on how to mainstream nutrition. Mainstreaming nutrition in 60% of projects also entails collaborating with other cross-cutting thematic areas (e.g., gender, youth and Indigenous Peoples, but also agro-biodiversity, climate change and environment), which are all mutually interlinked. IFAD has establish a set of core criteria that are required to make a project nutrition sensitive; those include: 1) a comprehensive nutrition situation analysis, 2) well-articulated nutrition pathways, activities and expected outcomes, 3) core nutrition-relevant indicators incorporated into the logframe, 4) allocation of financial resources in distinct budget lines and 5) clear implementation arrangements. IFAD will also continue to generate knowledge and evidence on interventions that work and innovative approaches to mainstreaming nutrition.