Briefing Papers Number 20, November 2012 | Page 11

intended outcomes.
The pathway addresses questions that affect
overall nutrition outcomes (for example: How
are the planned activities going to bring about
a change in nutrition status?). When mapping
out the pathway to nutritional impact, other
factors should also be taken into consideration
(e.g., equity factors such as the time, income,
and control over resources of the participating
women; other types of support they may need,
such as micronutrient supplementation).

Select, Implement, and Monitor Program Activities

Prioritizing Nutrition Interventions
The process of selecting, prioritizing, and designing country- or targeted
population-specific interventions needs to take into account many
different criteria, including identifying high-impact priority interventions
and mobilizing resources to scale up progress toward the MDGs. As the
Lancet series summarizes…“The charge to nutrition leaders at country
level is to review their existing strategies and programs to ensure
that priority is given to interventions with demonstrated impact on
undernutrition among pregnant women and children less than 2 years of
age, and then to develop feasible strategies for increasing public demand
for these interventions and delivering them at scale.”83 Clear definitions
and understanding of nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific nutrition
actions need to be accompanied by a standard set of assumptions and
operational constraints that are defined, addressed, and monitored.

The pathway to making an impact on nutriSuccessful implementation of priority nutrition interventions requires four
tion should be explained in a detailed implemenconditions:
tation plan that covers the whole “path,” including intermediate steps and activities to achieve
1. Target populations’ access to services or supplies
the program objectives. The implementation
2. Services or supplies of acceptable quality
plan should include well-defined nutrition-sen3. Target populations’ demand for and capacity to use the services and/
sitive and nutrition-specific interventions and
or adopt the promoted behaviors (this will generally require specific
state how intermediate results or outputs (proknowledge and skills along with favorable attitudes)
gram results achieved throughout the execution
4. An accommodating social and policy environment84
of activities) will be tracked, including building
in-country capacity to monitor and evaluate
More attention is needed to the institutional capacity and governance
program implementation and results, and will
arrangements required to enable successful implementation of nutrition
programs on a large scale (Bryce et al. 2008).85
lead to the expected nutrition improvements.
The project framework or pathway should state
clearly the assumptions made about how these
activities will improve nutrition outcomes. After the path trition security.88 Nutrition outcome indicators should be
has been defined, program strategies and activities will be tracked throughout the life of the program. Since there is no
identified.
one-size-fits-all solution, the indicators will vary according to
the nature and the duration of the intervention. Examples
of nutrition outcome indicators that are linked to nutritionSet, Track, and Monitor Process (Output), Outcome,
specific interventions include:
and Impact Indicators
• Minimum