Sixty percent of new projects designed between 2022 and 2025 are nutrition sensitive

In order to achieve this commitment, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) deploys nutrition and social inclusion specialists to support design teams and governments to mainstream nutrition in new Country Strategic Opportunities Programmes (COSOPs) and all new projects designed from 2022. This includes building the capacity of IFAD staff, consultants and implementing partners (IPs) on how to mainstream nutrition in IFAD investments and capitalisation of lessons learnt. IFAD’s ‘How to Do’ 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 (eg, gender, youth and IPs, but also agrobiodiversity, climate change and environment), which are all mutually interlinked. IFAD has established a set of core criteria that are required to make a project nutrition sensitive, including 1) a comprehensive nutrition situational 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.