The Power of Nutrition aims to take to scale evidence-based nutrition interventions
Evidence shows that improving quality of nutrition in the crucial first 1,000 days of a child’s life – and on through early childhood – represents the best way to reduce the risk malnutrition and the lifelong implications they bring.
We therefore seek to use our investments to support programmes that take to scale a sub-set of 11 priority interventions that have been proven to have the biggest impact improving nutrition for mothers, babies and young children and reducing the risk of stunting, wasting and loss of life.
The programmes that we invest in use a combination of these interventions, tailored to specific local context and need, to improve nutrition outcomes. To ensure sustainability, the scale up of these interventions are embedded in health systems, social protection programmes and / or agricultural programmes as appropriate for the context.
Picture: The Power of Nutrition, Liberia programme visit, 2018
In order to ensure that our investments are having the greatest possible impact on undernutrition, The Power of Nutrition is committed to a rigorous approach to monitoring, evaluation, and learning.
The Power of Nutrition carries out in depth assessments through the lifetime of each of our investment programmes to measure progress and impact against core objectives and key performance indicators. These include:
i) Rapid service coverage assessments to identify barriers to access and for early indications of whether projects are on track to contribute to reduced undernutrition;
ii) Operational research and pilots to test innovative approaches to improve service delivery and utilisation or encourage healthy feeding behaviours.
We use these assessments to determine the long term impact that our investments are having and how the programmes we help to fund are contributing to changes in household nutrition practices and the prevalence of stunting, wasting or anaemia, through quasi-experimental studies, qualitative interviews and case studies, or triangulation with national surveys, such as Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS).
We are committed to using this information to constantly improve how we work and to sharing lessons learned from our investments’ successes and challenges with our partners and the nutrition community more broadly. We regularly join missions with implementing partners and governments to discuss results and how programmes can be improved for greater impact.
