BACKGROUND

Malnutrition is an underlying cause in almost half of child deaths and a persistent barrier to economic growth, with countries in Africa and Asia losing up to 11% of their gross domestic product each year because of malnutrition. Nampula—Mozambique’s largest and most densely populated province—has the highest prevalence of malnutrition with 55% of children with stunted growth, a full 12% higher than the national average. The Government of the Republic of Mozambique (GRM) has made the reduction of malnutrition one of its key economic and health priorities. Yet, despite recent decades of investments in food security and nutrition, the prevalence of malnutrition remains high and its social and economic effects continue to hinder Mozambique’s progress. 

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

USAID Advancing Nutrition, in collaboration with USAID’s Transform Nutrition project, aims to address these challenges by focusing on strengthening the national and subnational government and partners in three ways. First, it provides technical assistance to the Ministry of Health to improve its capacity to plan and manage nutrition programming, thus enhancing the national nutrition workforce. Second, it provides technical assistance to provincial and district coordination councils to improve planning, programming, and evaluation across sectors. Third, it supports Transform Nutrition partners to implement multi-sectoral nutrition programming. A secondary focus is direct technical support to the USAID Nutrition Team in areas such as data quality assurance. This activity is expected to phase most of its interventions to the local Transform Nutrition partner over two-to-three years.

EXPECTED RESULTS AND IMPACTS

The activity will result in the GRM and local partners having greater capacity to plan, manage, and deliver multi-sectoral nutrition programming from national to community levels, ultimately resulting in better nutrition of pregnant and lactating women, adolescent girls, and young children.