Welcome to the Nutrition-Sensitive Extension Library!
The GFRAS Nutrition Working Group (NWG) collected and organized the materials in this library so that extensionists, program developers, researchers, and decision makers would be able to access existing resources related to agricultural extension and advisory services (AEAS), and nutrition. Growing attention to the need to make food systems more responsive to human nutrition has motivated related AEAS activities, yet NWG members identified that project-level materials were often hard to find. It is our hope that by making resources available in a searchable platform, individuals working in this area can build off of the experience of previous activities and effectively meet the needs and opportunities that they encounter.
Do you have a resource that you would like to make available in the library? Please submit it here!
About the Nutrition Working Group:
The NWG aims to bring global attention to leveraging RAS for improved nutrition by engaging relevant stakeholders: practitioners, researchers, donors, etc. It was initiated by GFRAS, the INGENAES project, and FAO in 2016.
Displaying items by tag: Tanzania
Tanzania: Landscape Analysis
This landscape study provides an overview of Tanzania’s agriculture and the status of country’s extension system. It also provides information on the prevalence of poverty, nutrition and gender related issues in the country with special focus on rural areas. It summarizes Tanzania’s current agricultural and nutrition policy, and provides a summary of several on-going projects by the United States Government (USG) and other donors in the country related to agriculture extension, and gender and nutrition impacts.
Rural Agricultural Development Innovation for Food and Nutrition Security: Findings from a Study in Tanzania
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the world’s most food-insecure region in spite of its abundant agricultural potential. In an attempt to contribute towards overcoming this problem, an agricultural development approach known as RIPAT (Rural Initiatives for Participatory Agricultural Transformation) has been developed over the period since 2006 through a series of projects in northern Tanzania.
It has for decades been anticipated by development actors that pro-poor agricultural development interventions would be the direct route to improved nutrition among smallholder farm families. However, it is difficult to find evidence that documents such linkage – partly because of poor quality evaluations, but also because it has been realised that agricultural development interventions must be designed to a much larger extent with a nutritional lens and must take into account what types of agricultural component can lead to improved nutrition. We provide research evidence of improved rural food and nutrition security following the application of the RIPAT approach.
Agricultural Technology Adoption, Food Security, Poverty and Child Health
The three self-contained chapters of this dissertation evolves around different aspects of a Farmer Field School intervention taking place in northern Tanzania, studying the diffusion of agricultural technologies and how agriculture links to food security, poverty and child health. The intervention is called RIPAT (Rural Initiatives for Participatory Agricultural Transformation) and was funded by the Rockwool Foundation. As a consultant for the Rockwool Foundation I administered a large scale data collection for an impact evaluation of RIPAT.
All three chapters of my dissertation build on these data. The first two chapters are coauthored with Helene Bie Lilleør. A recurrent theme in this dissertation is the identification of causal effects. Since participation in RIPAT is voluntary, the data does not offer direct experimental variation which I can exploit for identification, and there exists no baseline data collected before the implementation of RIPAT I to control for selection. I pursue different identification strategies which are detailed in the three chapters. In the following, I provide a preview of the findings.