Women of reproductive age (WRA) are often nutritionally vulnerable because of the physiological demands of pregnancy and lactation. Requirements for most nutrients are higher for pregnant and lactating women than for adult men. The Minimum Dietary Diversity for WRA (MDD-W) indicator is a food-based diversity indicator that has been shown to reflect one key dimension of diet quality: micronutrient adequacy summarized across 11 micronutrients (Martin-Prével et al., 2015). Since the launch of the MDD-W indicator in 2015, new global developments and research conducted in three countries to further determine best practices in the data collection resulted in new information and guidelines. This research was supported by capacity-development activities on the assessment of individual food consumption.This publication is an update to the 2016 FAO/FHI 360 joint publication MDD-W: A Guide to Measurement. It includes guidance on the most accurate and valid methodologies on collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and presenting data on women’s dietary diversity, for use in research, impact assessment and large-scale, health and nutrition surveys such as the Demographic Health Survey (DHS), to generate nationally representative data, that are comparable over time and across countries.In addition to supporting the regular collection of high-quality dietary data following standardized methodologies, the publication also aims to promote dialogues on and appropriate application of the data towards informing policy and programming decisions and monitoring and evaluation of nutrition outcomes and progress at global, regional, and country levels.

It is vital for countries to monitor their population’s diets to inform actions toward improving the health of people and the planet. The healthiness of diets must be tracked in global frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to help monitor how the world’s population is faring. Currently, few countries regularly assess diets and there are no dietary indicators in global monitoring frameworks. Recognizing the importance of diets for health and the lack of consensus on how to measure and monitor healthy diets at scale, FAO, UNICEF and WHO joined forces to chart a way forward via the Healthy Diets Monitoring Initiative (HDMI). The joint mission of the HDMI is to enable national and global decision-makers and stakeholders to monitor and achieve healthy diets for people and the planet. The current guidance document is focused on healthy diets for healthy people. This version of the document provides an overview of the range of purposes for measuring the healthiness of diets and offers examples of the dietary assessment methods and types of dietary intake data, surveys and metrics that are currently available to monitor healthy diets.

This report scientifically assesses the validity, usefulness, and fitness-for-purpose of existing healthy diet metrics for population assessment for global and national monitoring. Existing healthy diet metrics were identified and critically assessed through a set of criteria for their use as global and national monitoring indicators. After comparative evaluation, three healthy diet metrics were identified as the most suitable for global and national monitoring. The report highlights strengths and weaknesses for the existing healthy diet indicators. Some may be suitable for simple data collection tools and short data collection time while other indicators may require complex quantitative dietary information, lengthy data collection time, and might need to confirm the validity in various contexts. Some of them may only capture a limited number of the sub-constructs of the construct of healthy diets. The report underlines main knowledge gap regarding the population groups for which the metrics could be used – whether these indicators were developed for a particular demographic and/or socioeconomic groups and their ability to be used for other population groups. The report also identifies key priority areas to further explore how these indicators could be used for more population groups and settings.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF) supports the mainstreaming of nutrition into national development plans and activities to strengthen agriculture, food, health, education and social protection systems, among other things. This guidance note helps integrating nutrition across the UNSDCF cycle. It is designed to be flexible and applicable in all phases of the Cooperation Framework, highlighting opportunities to integrate and strengthen the focus on nutrition throughout the process. The guidance note complements other existing tools developed by specialized United Nations’ agencies, programmes and funds, as well as by the UN-Nutrition Secretariat, and it can be equally utilized in countries under the United Nations Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) or the UNSDCF.

FAO provides countries with technical support to conduct nutrition assessments, in particular to build the evidence base required for countries to achieve commitments made at the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) and under the 2016-2025 UN Decade of Action on Nutrition. Such concrete evidence can only derive from precise and valid measures of what people eat and drink. There is a wide range of dietary assessment methods available to measure food and nutrient intakes (expressed as energy insufficiency, diet quality and food patterns etc.) in diet and nutrition surveys, in impact surveys, and in monitoring and evaluation. Differenct indicators can be selected according to a study's objectives, sample population, costs and required precision. In low capacity settings, a number of other issues should be considered (e.g. availability of food composition tables, cultural and community specific issues, such as intra-household distribution of foods and eating from shared plates, etc.). This manual aims to signpost for the users the best way to measure food and nutrient intakes and to enhance their understanding of the key features, strengths and limitations of various methods. It also highlights a number of common methodological considerations involved in the selection process. Target audience comprises of individuals (policy-makers, programme managers, educators, health professionals including dietitians and nutritionists, field workers and researchers) involved in national surveys, programme planning and monitoring and evaluation in low capacity settings, as well as those in charge of knowledge brokering for policy-making.

Africa is confronted with the triple burden of malnutrition; it is also faced with the triple challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment. In many African countries, large proportions of the population rely on agriculture not only for their food - but also for their livelihoods. A transformed agricultural and food system is thus a necessary condition for addressing this double-triple challenge. Additionally, post harvest and food waste and losses reduce the availability of sufficient quantities of safe, edible and preferable foods. At least one third of food produced at farm level is lost due to inappropriate storage, infrastructure and agro-processing technologies in developing countries; and one third of food purchased is wasted at household and retail level.

This study, supported by the Netherlands Development Organisation (SNV), obtained information on a range of topics associated with food security and nutrition, gender, and water access in selected villages of Honduras. The data collection prioritized a set of communities of interest to the civil society organizations that are part of the Voice for Change Program in Honduras. The data collection, done in 2018, covered 647 households across the departments of Choluteca, Lempira, and Ocotepeque. Most households surveyed face high levels of food insecurity. Only 26% of the women between 12 and 49 years are receiving the minimum dietary diversity. Access to water and sanitation is also limited with 30% of the households sourcing their water from a well or river and 51% not treating the water before drinking it. According to the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) only 34% of women sampled are considered empowered. The survey results indicate that the biggest hurdles to women’s empowerment are the amount of time spent working and limited decision-making power regarding accessing credit and productive activities.

This study assesses progress in the implementation of the nutrition-sensitive interventions of the fourth phase of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP-4) and its impact on: (1) the pathways underpinning children’s nutritional status; and (2) the roles it plays in reducing the malign effect of seasonality on the nutritional status of women and pre-school children. The analysis is based on four rounds of household survey data, conducted in March and August 2017 (baseline) and March and August 2019 (endline). These surveys focused on households with a child less than 24 months of age (index child) and his/her mother (index mother). In 2017 and 2019, the survey teams visited more than 2,500 households in 264 kebeles in 88 PSNP woredas in the Amhara, Oromia, SNNP, and Tigray regions.

As the nature of global malnutrition changes, there is a growing need and increasing urgency for more and better information about food consumption and dietary patterns. The past two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the number, availability, and analysis of the food consumption data collected in a variety of multipurpose household surveys, referred to collectively as household consumption and expenditure surveys (HCESs). These surveys are heterogeneous, and their quality varies substantially by country. Still, they share some common shortcomings in their measurement of food consumption, nutrient intakes, and nutrition status that undermine their relevance and reliability for purposes of designing and implementing food policies and programs. This review crafts a strategic approach to the unfinished global agenda of improving HCESs’ collection of food consumption data. Starting with the priority studies recommended by a 100-country HCES review (Smith, Dupriez, and Troubat 2014), it focuses on a strategic subset of those studies that deal most directly and exclusively with the measurement of food, and that are of fundamental importance to all HCES stakeholders in low- and middle-income countries. Drawing from the literature, this study provides a more detailed, more circumspect justification as to why these particular studies are needed, while identifying key hypotheses, explaining why these studies are of growing urgency, and demonstrating why now is a propitious time for undertaking them. The review also identifies important study design considerations while pointing out potential challenges to successful implementation stemming from technical capacity, economic, administrative, and political considerations. Six key studies are rank ordered from a global perspective as follows, taking into account (1) the likely shared consensus that a topic is an important source of measurement error in estimating consumption; (2) the perceived urgency of the need for addressing a particular source of measurement error; (3) the perceived likelihood of success—that is, that the efforts will improve the accuracy of measurement; (4) whether or not the study entails modifying the questionnaire; (5) the ease with which a study may begin; and (6) the extent to which the study is independent of necessary negotiations with existing HCES stakeholders because of the types of changes it is likely to entail (in either the questionnaire or the way the data have traditionally been processed).