The Food Security and Nutrition Network resource library features practical implementation-focused guides, tools, and training materials in a number of relevant program areas. You can browse the library by topic or view the newest, highest rated, most downloaded or FSN Network recommended materials. If you know what you are looking for you can also search by author or title.
We welcome submissions of new resources from the community. Please remember we are looking for high-quality, published materials, that offer guidance for improved food security and nutrition implementation.
This report presents findings from the baseline study of the PM2A research in Burundi. The overall objective of this research is to assess the impact and cost-effectiveness of PM2A on child nutritional status and to assess the optimal timing and duration of PM2A. The research is being carried out in the context of the Tubaramure program, a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Title II development food aid program implemented by a consortium of nongovernmental organizations in eastern Burundi. Tubaramure has three core components, which together define PM2A: improved health services for pregnant and lactating women and for children under 2 years of age; a strong social and behavior change communication (SBCC) strategy focused on improving health- and nutrition-related behaviors; and the distribution of food rations to the targeted populations. This report provides baseline values on key outcome variables for each of four comparison groups included in the PM2A research. To assess program effectiveness, these same outcome variables will also be measured at the end of the intervention for each comparison group.
The Department of Health and Nutrition's Emergency Health and Nutrition (EHN) team at Save the Children recently launched the CMAM Toolkit, a collection of resources for rapid start up of emergency nutrition programming. Although most of the guidelines and protocols are not new, this is the first time they have been brought together in one easy to use kit.
In addition, four NEW tools have been created to guide the process of:
1) Determining the Need for Intervention;
2) Program Planning;
3) Estimating Caseloads and;
4) Estimating Supplies Needed.
Accompanying The CMAM Toolkit is an interactive online tutorial that, in less than 30 minutes, will provide a comprehensive introduction to The Toolkit, walk you through programming tools, show you how to estimate caseloads and supplies, and help you locate and adapt tools needed for rapid implementation.
You don't need to be a nutritionist to learn more about available resources for emergency nutrition programming.
The USAID evaluation policy is intended to provide clarity to USAID staff, partners and stakeholders about the purposes of evaluation, the types of evaluations that are required and recommended, and the approach for conducting, disseminating and using evaluations. Intended primarily to guide staff decisions regarding the practice of evaluation within projects managed by USAID, it also serves to communicate to implementing partners and key stakeholders a new approach to evaluation.
This 4-page technical note on NACS was released by FANTA III. The NACS approach aims to improve the nutritional status of individuals and populations by integrating nutrition into policies, programs, and the health service delivery infrastructure.
Published in 2010, this online course provides the basic steps a humanitarian worker must take to ensure gender equality in programming. The course includes information on the core issues of gender and how it relates to other aspects of humanitarian response.
The three hour, self-paced course provides information and scenarios which will enable you to practice developing gender-sensitive programming. This training is based on the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Gender Handbook and related IASC guidelines, including the Guidelines for Gender-based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian Settings and others.
If you would learn how to include this course in your organization's training curriculum, please email: iascgenderelearning@un.org
This manual is designed to guide CARE USA Country Offices in the crafting and operationalizing of a partnership strategy to support CARE’s household livelihood security programming framework. It is a compendium of material gleaned from the experiences of many sources and woven into a CARE format to harmonize with strategic planning processes.
This toolbox from WWF UK's Organisational Learning Unit consists of six partnership tools used extensively by WWF UK and its partners. It has advice and tools for developing, formalizing and monitoring partnerships.
Food vouchers, as well as Local and Regional Procurement programs, are assuming greater importance as alternatives to traditional food aid. Catholic Relief Services commissioned a study to analyze the effects of food vouchers and procurement programs in Project ADVANCE, which CRS implemented in Niger between August and October 2010. The lessons from this experience were taken into account in the design of food voucher program in 2011 in the same area.
This guidance note is produced to help Title II development food assistance programawardees to develop a standard Scope of Work (SOW) for the Mid-term Evaluation(MTE).
This guide presents an approach to developing a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system for projects supported by Catholic Relief Services (CRS). The content is derived from guidance in ProPack (CRS, 2004 and CRS, 2007) and streamlined based on experience in CRS country programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Principles of Persuasion, Part 1: Consistency and Commitment is a narrated presentation that explains the scientific findings on persuasion, and how you can use persuasion principles in your food security, child survival and other community development work.
Quality Improvement and Verification Checklists (QIVCs) provide a detailed check of development workers’ performance on their key processes in order to monitor and improve their performance, identify “system problems,” and to encourage them. QIVCs are being used in many countries throughout the world to improve key processes.&
A Positive Deviance/Hearth Nutrition Program is a home-and neighborhood-based nutrition program for children who are at risk for protein-energy malnutrition in developing countries.
The Partnership Defined Quality Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit provides a set of tools including supervisory checklists, mapping tools and an exit interview to support the implementation of PDQ. These tools have been developed by various country‐based programs to document changes in quality at the community level.
This manual was designed to be a resource and guide for exploring and planning quality improvement activities through partnership activities involving service providers and the community members that they are meant to serve.
This is an FSN Network SBC Task Force approved method.
This facilitation guide is designed as a training supplement for the PDQ manual. The guide will enable the facilitator to conduct a PDQ training that will enhance the participants’ understanding of when and how PDQ can be used to strengthen quality and access, and equip them with the skills necessary to adapt and implement PDQ in their programs.
This guide, developed by World Relief, explores the evidence base for the Care Group model, offers criteria to assist project managers in determining the feasibility of using this approach within their own programs and provides a step-by-step guide for starting and sustaining care groups.
These show the preliminary findings of a multi-year study to investigate the factors that predict program sustainability after exit. Four countries participated in the study: Bolivia, Honduras, India, and Kenya. The programs were assessed at the time of exit through two years after program shut down, using both qualitative methods and quantitative survey data. The final report will be released later this year.
The purpose of this tool is to obtain a quick understanding of the emergency food security and livelihood situation, within the first few days after a rapid-onset disaster. The tool is independent of other multi-sectoral assessments and collects information only on food security and livelihoods (EFSL).
This tool is designed specifically for:
humanitarian staff with no or limited technical skills, for example humanitarian program managers
food security and livelihoods technical staff with little experience of rapid-onset disasters in urban and rural contexts, for example staff usually involved in long-term livelihood programming
The EFSL training materials can be used to train participants to confidently apply the ‘48-hour Assessment tool’ to assess the impact of a shock/hazard on an affected population’s food security and livelihoods. The training materials can be accessed on the Emergency Capacity Building Project website.
This training module, developed by CORE Group, is designed to help NGOs and civil society organizations learn how to conduct audience research to develop social and behavior change (SBC) activities. This module focuses on SBC that can be used to add family planning to existing maternal and child health programming, with a focus on community level work. Staff of such organizations can learn first to conduct very targeted audience research, and then to use their findings to develop effective social and behavior change strategies. This module can be adapted for training public sector employees, community health volunteers, and others.
The tool is designed for use of local staff to run a two-and-a-half day training course that teaches the basics of "designing for behavior change." It serves as a starting point for addressing family planning by building skills and helping staff get started in social and behavior change. The concepts and tools can also be applied to other topics including, maternal and child health, nutrition, infectious disease care and control, sanitation, and more.
This manual, developed by Save the Children, aims to help food and logistics managers. It provides basic information on hunger, food insecurity, and household coping strategies, and the role that food plays in programming, but also goes in depth in commodity management issues.
This guidance note is produced to help Title II development food assistance programawardees to develop a standard Scope of Work (SOW) for the Mid-term Evaluation(MTE).
Food security professionals increasing realize that they must use communications strategically for their work to have a maximum impact. While most organizations have invested heavily in food security analysis and research, many still need to enhance their communications to ensure their findings reach their intended users and action is taken.
This toolkit is geared to helping food security professionals develop a communication strategy and communicate more effectively with their target audiences. Specific sections of the toolkit focus on policy makers and the media, because of the important role they play in implementing and influencing food security policies.
The toolkit also looks at specific information products such as policy briefs, reports and early warning bulletins, and suggests ways to structure and improve them. A section on writing effectively, which focuses on grammar and style, makes sure that written documents are easy to read. Finally, the toolkit gives tips for using the internet, social media and Web 2.0 tools as these technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for engaging in two way dialogues with global audiences. The toolkit also includes readymade templates and dozens of tips and tricks distilled from many years of experience.
While aimed at professionals working in food security related fields, the lessons in this toolkit can easily be applied to many other fields.
Organizational Authors:
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
1) Gender Analysis, Assessment, and Audit Manual and Toolkit
This document was developed for use by ACDI/VOCA staff and consultants in completing gender studies, but has been made available to a wider audience. It provides guidance and tools from the early stages of planning analyses and assessments through the process of collecting and analyzing information. USAID, FAO, Peace Corps, the World Bank, and others are cited throughout.
2) 10 Steps for Operationalizing a Gender Analysis Study is a one page document offering tips to aid organizations in utilizing the information collected.
This resource, from Catholic Relief Services (CRS), outlines their 4-phase strategy for creating a value-chain-friendly environment. Until recently, municipal governments in Nicaragua had not considered agricultural development to be part of their institutional mandate, making it difficult for small producers to competitively engage in agricultural value chains. CRS and its partners created the Alliance to Create Opportunities for Rural Development through Agroenterprise Relationships (ACORDAR) project in 2007. Since then, ACORDAR has helped more than 3,000 Nicaraguan farmers achieve a 98 percent increase in sales and a 117 percent increase in net income.
The ELRHA Guide to Constructing Effective Partnerships is a resource to support collaboration between humanitarian and academic organisations.
Based on the experiences and lessons learned by people in both communities who have worked together, it is a practical guide to the opportunities and challenges specific to humanitarian-academic collaboration.
It is available as an online interactive guide on ELRHA's website. The online guide has been built in such a way as to be highly interactive with links from the Seven Steps to relevant Evidence and Learning in other parts of the Guide.
Organizational Authors:
Enhancing Learning & Research for Humanitarian Assistance
This literature review utilizes secondary data and information from books, journals, expert interviews, and the Internet to answer several research questions: Can livestock improve people’s capacity to cope with risk and vulnerability? If so, how has this been done? How can this coping be improved? The review endeavors to enhance understanding and awareness of the current status of the livestock sector and the main livestock keepers in Africa, and illustrate how livestock interventions can be used as coping mechanisms to alleviate household food insecurity and improve livelihoods.
This paper contains the technical and practical reflections of a statistician on the use of Randomised Control Trial designs (RCT) for evaluating the impact of development initiatives.
Authors:
Carlos Barahona
Organizational Authors:
Institutional Learning and Change (ILAC) Initiative
This guide is designed for tuberculosis (TB) programme managers and staff who intend to conduct advocacy, communication and social mobilization (ACSM) activities as part of their broader TB control strategy. The guide may also be a helpful tool for consultants hired to assist country programmes in conducting ACSM work. The guide was developed as a tool to help systematize countries’ approaches to collecting and using data on knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) as an evidence base for planning, refining and evaluating ACSM work.
Experimental aspects of on-farm research should help on-farm researchers arrive at solid conclusions, taking into account, rather than eliminating, variation among farmers. The objective of this type of applied agricultural research is to identify new farming practices and materials that will improve the farmers’ production system and increase their productivity and well-being in a way that is sustainable.
The Issue Brief summarizes recommendations from a new report of the same name, released by The Chicago Council and authored by Dr. Rachel Nugent of the University of Washington. The report calls on the agriculture and food sectors to play a role in mitigating the global rise in noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and identifies new opportunities for those in health and agriculture to work together to promote better health
Characteristics of a Disaster-Resilient Community is a guidance note for government and civil society organizations working on disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation (CCA) initiatives at community level in partnership with vulnerable communities. It shows what a ‘disaster-resilient community’ might consist of, by setting out the many different elements of resilience. It also provides some ideas about how to progress towards resilience.
Authors:
John Twigg
Organizational Authors:
Interagency Group:(ActionAid, British Red Cross, Christian Aid, Plan UK, Practical Action and Tearfund)
The Manual for Nutrition Treatment and Rehabilitation, Volume I (Manual de Tratamento e Reabilitação Nutricional, Volume I) contains protocols for the treatment of acute malnutrition for children 0-15 years with or without HIV and/or tuberculosis. The manual is accompanied by job aids, which are aimed at helping implementation of inpatient and outpatient treatment. The Facilitators Training Guide and Participants Handouts are used to train health facility staff and community-based health workers. All the materials are in Portuguese. Please click here to view the Portuguese manual.
This Approach Paper is intended to inform the next phase of DFID’s work on resilience to both natural and man-made disasters,5 by providing a starting point for discussion within the Department and with our partners. Although the focus is on disasters, this is part of a wider process to mainstream resilience across all of DFID’s work which is being led by Policy Division.
This working paper reviews academic conceptualisation of the concept of ‘resilience’ in social, ecological and socio-ecological systems. It reviews 16 overlapping conceptualisations of resilience from the literature, outlining key characteristics and indicators of resilience. A metatable captures the key findings of the paper, including detail on indicators.
This presentation compares the indicator gap closure (i.e., performance index) on 13 “Rapid CATCH” indicators measured by 58 USAID-funded child survival projects ending between 2003 and 2009, and nine child survival projects (most from the same period, but one ending in 2010) using Care Groups. The results are striking, and further confirm the value of Care Groups for bringing about behavior change. Since this original analysis, statistical analysis was done to determine whether the differences noted in the presentation were statistically significant. The sample size of Care Group projects was small, but there was a statistically-significant difference (p<0.05) between the overall performance index (all indicators) and also for the exclusive breastfeeding indicator. (Please note that not all of the indicators used remained the same over time (e.g., HWWS), but the comparison was done using the original Rapid CATCH indicator list for which we had data for the CSHGP projects.) Please click here to view slides.
These files provide an example of how LQAS can be used to periodically measure changes in behavior and provide concise feedback to each district on what they need to continue to work on. More details are given in the document, “Overview of FH LQAS Use with Care Groups.doc".
This tool, developed by Carolyn Wetzel, Director of Health Programs at Food for the Hungry, allows you to enter demographic data and have an estimation of the number of Care Groups, Promoters, and Care Group volunteers needed, as well as estimates of the beneficiary population that you will serve.
A technical advisory group meeting on Care Groups was conducted on 12/8/2010 by the CORE Group and MCHIP. This meeting brought together practitioners of the Care Group (CG) model from a variety of organizations in order to consider what is currently known about the effectiveness of the model and implications for scaling up. Critical questions for the group to consider included whether Care Groups should be scaled up, and if so, how, when, and where does it fit into the types of systems governments are looking at for community health workers around the world.
This manual is designed to guide CARE USA Country Offices in the crafting and operationalizing of a partnership strategy to support CARE’s household livelihood security programming framework. It is a compendium of material gleaned from the experiences of many sources and woven into a CARE format to harmonize with strategic planning processes.
This guide introduces a conceptual framework, or roadmap, to program and project planning. It is designed to help development practitioners understand the process of design specifically as it relates to development assistance promoted by CARE.
This manual presents case definitions for 15 priority livestock diseases that have significance in terms of food security, public health, and international trade. Where possible, the case definition is complemented with photos of clinical signs and postmortem lesions.
This manual defines processes, procedures, safeguards and standards to guide the application of cash and vouchers in WFP.
The content of this manual covers two broad categories: • Aid to Judgement: This is guidance that is intended mainly to help Country Offices with the decision–making process. These are not mandatory but rather recommended practices. • Prescriptive: These are the procedures and process steps that are non–negotiable and must be addressed by the Country Office. These are marked as ‘mandatory’. All corporate procedures, such as finance and procurement, are within this category.
This document was written to primarily provide guidance for conceptualizing, writing, selecting and measuring project performance indicators. That guidance is placed within the larger context of articulating theories of change, conceptualizing and writing objective and results statements and creating logical and results frameworks.
Collaborate with your peers to share knowledge, learn from program experience, and develop and adapt tools and materials for improved program implementation. If interested, contact info.fsn.network@gmail.com.
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