60% of new projects designed between 2025 and 2027 are nutrition sensitive

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 (COSOP) 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 maximize 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 Country Strategies and Opportunity Programmes (COSOPs) and all new projects designed form 2022. This includes building capacity of iFAD staff, consultants and implementing partners on How to mainstream nutrition in IFAD investments and capitalization of lessons learned. IFAD "How to do" provides detailed step by step guidance on how to mainstream nutrition. Mainstreaming nutrition in sixty percent of projects also entails to collaborate with other crosscutting thematic areas (e.g. gender, youth and IPs, 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: (i) a comprehensive nutrition situation analysis, (ii) well-articulated nutrition pathways, activities and expected outcomes, (iii) core nutrition-relevant indicators incorporated into the logframe, (iv) allocation of financial resources in distinct budget lines, and (v) clear implementation arrangements. IFAD will also continue to generate knowledge and evidence on interventions that work and innovative approaches to mainstreaming nutrition.