Expanding access to nutritious and diverse diets, NCBA CLUSA will continue to work in Senegal with the awarding of a new $40 million Feed the Future project.
Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Feed the Future Senegal Cultivating Nutrition Project began November 2017 and will run through 2022, with the goal of reaching over half a million children under age five and their families with nutrition interventions.
The project will focus on nutrition and will build on the foundation of Feed the Future Yaajeende, which among other impacts, reduced child stunting by 30 percent and poverty by 7 percent in 800 villages, lifting approximately 56,000 people above the poverty line, despite four years of recurrent drought and weather crises.
Senegal has made great progress in the fight against child undernutrition, according to a 2017 study by the International Food Policy Research Institute. The Feed the Future Cultivating Nutrition project will follow Yaajeende in consolidating, replicating and scaling these important achievements.
“We are very excited that this new project will allow more Senegalese households and communities to build on what we have learned in addressing undernutrition,” said Amy Coughenour Betancourt, NCBA CLUSA’s Chief Operating Officer for International Programs.
Moving into a “platform approach,” NCBA CLUSA will train and support local institutions to lead their own community development. This will allow communities to sustainably increase consumption of nutritious and safe diets, increase on-farm availability and market supply of diverse, micro-nutrient rich foods, increase resilience and income, increase adoption of nutrition and care practices and improve the governance of food systems in 3,500 villages across 150 communes in 10 regions—reaching 285,000 households and 2.8 million people over five years.
The project will build out a food systems approach pioneered by the Yaajeende Project—Nutrition Led Agriculture. The holistic, market-driven and nutrition based approach to agriculture and food security integrates nutrition at every point of the agriculture value chain.
Key to this approach, NCBA CLUSA will partner with and strengthen local, regional and national private and public sector partnerships including Mother’s groups, Citizen Working Groups, Community Based Solution Providers (CBSPs), private firms and research institutions.
The CultiVert social franchise, which was developed as a part of Yaajeende and formalized the village-based agent CBSP network, will increase the branding, access and trust of nutritious products in rural communities.
A set of guiding principles—sustainability, empowerment, resilience, science and innovation, targeting of investments and coordination—are foundational to the project.
Feed the Future Senegal Cultivating Nutrition partners Hellen Keller International, John Snow International (JSI), Sheladia Associates and Dimagi.
Source: www.ncba.coop
