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 guide reviews some fundamental concepts that provide a foundation for working with a climate change perspective. It also introduces three strategies for dealing with climate change: adaptation to its effects, mitigation to slow the process of climate change, and adoption of climate-smart agriculture. The guide also provides concrete ways to help the rural poor adapt to climate change. The action steps provide a structured and practical approach to developing better projects that include a climate change perspective—from analyzing the situation to proactively engaging with communities.
This manual contains tested group education modules intended for fathers and their partners, most often spouses, in the plantation region (or tea estates). The purpose of this manual is to promote gender equality within the home and children’s healthy development and overall well-being. This tool by no means looks at every single dimension of fatherhood, gender equality, and family well-being, but rather offers a series of tested activities and group discussions that provide a strong foundation for addressing and transforming norms within families, communities, and masculinity.
Mercy Corps (1) Gender Policy (June 2011), (2) Gender Procedures (not intended to be a comprehensive mainstreaming guide, but an introduction to some of the basics), and (3) an annex containing gender analysis tools and GBV resources.
These documents are also available in Spanish, French, and Arabic. Contact Sahar Alnouri [mailto:salnouri@mercycorps.org] for more information.
This Discussion Paper was produced as part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) project "Modernizing Extension and Advisory Services" (MEAS, www.meas-extension.org). Along with examples of gender equitable extension services, the paper also provides illustrative indicators and points for consideration in designing extension and advisory services for men and women.
Nine modules and toolkits cover key aspects of menstrual hygiene in different settings, including communities, schools and emergencies for women and girls in lower and middle-income countries.
This document, developed by Catholic Relief Services, is intended to provide information for country program staff and others who work with or who are planning to work with volunteers in their programs. It is not meant to be prescriptive, but rather to be a guide which is to be adapted to local contexts. Individuals may want to reference the document when preparing new project proposals involving volunteers.
The Gender Audit is a self-assessment tool for identifying staff perceptions regarding how gender issues are addressed in programming and in internal organizational systems and activities. It is also a process for creating ongoing gender action planning, and to identify challenges and opportunities for increasing gender skills and organizational equality.
This guide provides the field-level practitioner with tools and applications to reach very poor households. The intended outcome of the resource is to have greater market engagement for very poor households through enterprise development activities.
The guide focuses on allowing practitioners to more effectively reach the very poor, defined as those persons in the bottom half of the population below the nationally defined poverty line or those living on less than the purchasing power parity equivalent of $1 per day.
Value chain development methodologies have been used widely in enterprise and market development. Donors such as USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID, GIZ and AusAID have supported this work. For development organisations, value chain development tools have been helpful, but many of the tools have not been specifically designed to support or benefit very poor producers.
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.
This resource pack offers practical advice about how to implement a system for monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL) in emergencies. It provides
standards for MEAL in emergencies,
an overview of informal and formal monitoring,
guidance on how to conduct monitoring and evaluation,
ways to use the results to improve programs and
checklists, discussion guides, forms and other tools.
It also includes a visual representation of the progression of information needs and common monitoring methods and tools from the initial emergency response to a more stable situation. If offers guidance on when and how to sample and when and how to count during an emergency response and presents practices for conducting daily or weekly debrief meetings.
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
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.
A significant gap remains between need and capacity for management of severe acute malnutrition (SAM) in children. This is despite clear advances in the development and implementation of international and national protocols for the management of SAM, as well as guidelines and training for inpatient care of severely acutely malnourished children. The Training Guide for Community-Based Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) aims to address this gap by increasing knowledge of and building practical skills to implement CMAM in both emergency and non-emergency contexts. Guide also available in French language at http://www.fantaproject.org/cmam/training.shtml.
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.&
Barrier Analysis is a rapid assessment tool used in community health and other community development projects to identify behavioral determinants associated with a particular behavior. These behavioral determinants are identified so that more effective behavior change communication messages, strategies and supporting activities (e.g., creating support groups) can be developed.
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.
The Essential Nutrition Actions (ENA) Framework was developed with the support of USAID and has been implemented across Africa and Asia since 1997. It is an operational framework for managing the advocacy, planning and delivery of an integrated package of preventive nutrition actions encompassing infant & young child feeding (IYCF), micronutrients and women's nutrition. There ENA Framework includes 3 main guides: 1. The Booklet of Key ENA Messages 2. ENA Health Worker Training Guide 2b. ENA Health Worker Handouts 3. ENA Community Volunteers Training Guide
This report commissioned by World Vision and Save the Children calls for a radical rethinking of policies to address hunger in West Africa. The report aims to assess progress, lessons learned, and challenges in promoting resilience in the Sahel, with a particular focus on the well-being of children. The study demonstrates the need for a massive response by governments and partners in order to tackle child malnutrition – chronic and acute, together. It offers evidence-based recommendations for a comprehensive, child-focused approach to resilience in the Sahel.
Outcome Mapping offers a methodology that can be used to create planning, monitoring, and evaluation mechanisms enabling organizations to document, learn from, and report on their achievements. It is designed to assist in understanding an organization's results, while recognizing that contributions by other actors are essential to achieving the kinds of sustainable, large-scale improvements in human and ecological well-being toward which the organization is working.
This report, published by the Women's Refugee Commission, provides guidance and tools to help practitioners design safe economic programs for displaced women. The guidance is based on WRC's experience training approximately 200 practitioners in six countries on designing economic interventions as a tool of GBV prevention, site visits to refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia and desk research.
In addition, the WRC has developed an e-learning tool to help practitioners, policy makers and donors in the field and at headquarters gain a better understanding of how to mitigate the risk of GBV through safe and effective livelihood interventions.
The terms of reference (ToR) document defines all aspects of how a consultant or a team will conduct an evaluation. It defines the objectives and the scope of the evaluation, outlines the responsibilities of the consultant or team, and provides a clear description of the resources available to conduct the study. Developing an accurate and wellspecified ToR is a critical step in managing a high-quality evaluation. The evaluation ToR document serves as the basis for a contractual arrangement with one or more evaluators and sets the parameters against which the success of the assignment can be measured.
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.
Governments and international development partners are increasingly interested in school gardens. These have traditionally been used for science education, agricultural training or generating school income. Today, given the urgent need for increased food security, environmental protection, more secure livelihoods and better nutrition, perceptions of the potential of school gardens are changing with the belief that school gardens can become a foundation for a nation’s health and security.
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.
This chapter from Household Sample Surveys in Developing and Transition Countriesdescribes the role of data management in the design and implementation of national household surveys. It starts by discussing the relationship between data management and questionnaire design, and then explores the past, present and future options for survey data entry and data editing, and their implications for survey management in general.
This guide has been written to help project managers and M&E staff improve the quality of M&E in IFAD-supported projects. The Guide focuses on how M&E can support project management and engage project stakeholders in understanding project progress, learning from achievements and problems, and agreeing on how to improve both strategy and operations.
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.
This 8-page guide is based on Promoting Gender Equitable Opportunities in Agricultural Value Chains: A Handbook. This Handbook presents the “Integrating Gender Issues into Agricultural Value Chains” (INGIA-VC) approach. It was developed to bring together concepts from different technical areas in development, specifically gender, agriculture, microenterprise development, and value chains.
This guide is designed to help key staff and community volunteers assess and improve their eff orts to abate HIV/AIDS. It is meant principally for behavior change communication (BCC) program managers and staff, nongovernmental organization (NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs), and community volunteers who are developing and implementing community-based HIV/AIDS communication programs.
Eliminating gender-based violence (GBV) has long been a goal of the United States with USAID addressing GBV for nearly two decades. The equal participation of women in the political, economic and social spheres of societies across the world is a key ingredient for democratic development. Unless women fully enjoy their human rights, to which freedom from violence is inextricably bound, progress toward development will continue to fall short. Promoting women's rights and reducing gender-based violence are necessary to increase the effectiveness of development globally. Gender-based violence is manifested in many of the areas in which USAID works, cutting across both development and humanitarian assistance objectives.
This report, created by Save the Children, analyses the causes of malnutrition, focusing on chronic malnutrition and stunting in children. It identifies direct and indirect interventions that have proven to be effective, like exclusive breastfeeding, micronutrient supplementation, to introducingsocial protection programs, and adapting agricultural production to meet the nutritional needs of children. The report also examines political factors that contribute to the global burden of hunger and malnutrition.
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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