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Nutrition

Improving the environment for mothers and children to thrive


iDE works to develop a supportive environment for communities to have access and availability of nutritious foods, access to sanitation, and information to support families to make healthy choices around food consumption.

A key indicator in nutrition looks at height for age: 144 million children under the age of six are stunted today because of chronic undernutrition, which can have a lifelong impact. Stunted growth is not just due to a lack of food. Good nutrition begins pre-conception and is a product of environmental factors including clean water, hygiene, and sanitation as well as access to a safe, high-quality diet for both mother and child.

iDE takes both household- and community-level approaches to improving nutrition of vulnerable women and children, with a particular focus on the critical 1,000-day window from conception through a child’s second year, employing proven nutrition and hygiene behavior change models. 

iDE’s market ecosystems approach promotes sustainable incomes and livelihoods, lifting families out of poverty, measurably improving their access to high-quality foods, and ultimately making them more resilient to shocks and stresses. We capitalize on our  high-impact successes within WASH and nutrition-sensitive agriculture, promoting a supportive business environment for producers and entrepreneurs to deliver more, better, and safer nutritious foods and goods. We improve supply chains to ensure communities have better availability to safe, nutritious foods or biofortified crops; support entrepreneurs to target messaging around nutrition; and ensure the market has a supply of goods related to sanitation including toilets and soaps. Nutrition marketing conveys critical information that helps farmers, merchants, and mothers alike to adopt positive practices all along the value chain.

By understanding the market ecosystem (i.e., the value chains, market actors, and the complex interactions that shape the food supply) and the food systems environment (i.e., social and cultural norms that shape dietary choices, production practices, processing and distribution of foods, and intrahousehold food allocation), we can leverage the complex drivers of supply and demand for nutritious food. Utilizing a Human-Centered Design process allows us to effectively target where interventions can be most appropriate given the local context and identify where iDE is best positioned to support sustainable change. 

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Cambodian children encouraged to eat nutritious foods

With funding from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, iDE rolls out global effort to improve nutritional outcomes for rural families

Despite Cambodia's economic growth, substantial progress, socio-economic and gender inequalities persist, hampering people's access to a nutritious diet, according to the World Food Programme.


Read more: iDE aims to improve nutritional outcomes for children in their first 1,000 days of life
NEWFOUND KNOWLEDGE

Fatema Begun didn’t know much about good nutrition before becoming a part of an iDE homestead food production group. She received training on better child and maternal nutrition and was amazed after two years how she could see the difference in the growth of her children—how the health of her youngest child (born after she learned about nutrition) was so much better than her older children. iDE also helped her to learn how to breed chickens, grow garden vegetables, and farm fish, all of which she can use to feed her family and earn income for the household.

iDE PC BAN Fatema Begum Callout 3X2

Fatema Begum, Bangladesh

Nutrition Boosted By Income Generation in Bangladesh

Most households receiving training on poultry farming

Farhana Yeasmin, 24, remembers what it was like when her husband was the family’s sole earner. Because he was a day laborer and made little money, they struggled to even pay for basics. And if he couldn’t find work, the family sometimes skipped meals.


Read more: Gender discrimination leadings to poor nutritional status among women and children

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Agricultural value chain bears fruit

How adopting a new crop helped boost incomes and climate resilience of Cambodian farmers

The World Bank says improving the performance of agricultural value chains in emerging countries like Cambodia will be crucial to ending poverty and hunger, boosting shared prosperity, and stewarding the world’s natural resources. 


Read more: iDE was instrumental in establishing the value chain, under our Climate Smart Commercial Horticulture Cambodia (CSmart) program.