Nutrition-specific interventions

© Annie Bodmer-Roy/Save the Children

Our research questions

1. How can the constraints to scaling up nutrition-specific interventions be alleviated?

2. What is the potential of private sector involvement?

3. How can quality service delivery be enhanced?

4. What is the cost-effectiveness of direct interventions?

Nutrition-specific interventions are not being scaled up adequately

Nutrition-specific interventions target the immediate causes of undernutrition: inadequate dietary intake and ill-health. The 2013 Lancet Series on Maternal and Child Nutrition recommended ten direct interventions to be implemented at scale in countries with high rates of undernutrition. These interventions could reduce stunting by 20.3%. In fragile contexts, proven preventative direct interventions are rarely prioritised because of the urgent need to save lives. Also short-term programming cycles result in limited scale up.

Despite progress in understanding the technical aspects of nutrition interventions, there is a dearth of actionable research on how to scale up and sustain such interventions.Transform Nutrition have built on the evidence base with a foundational evidence review, which found nine critical ingredients for effective scaled-up impact on nutrition, and a number of studies which explore these ingredients in particular contexts.