Over the past years, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has been increasingly proactive in enabling smallholder farmers across the developing world to increase production and productivity, while concurrently enhancing their access to markets and integration into the value chains. However, experience shows that productivity and income increases do not automatically translate into improved nutritional status, especially among women, young people and children. Around three quarters of undernourished people live in rural areas of developing countries and are those producing most of the food. Addressing nutritional issues is, therefore, crucial to combating rural poverty, feeding the world in a sustainable manner and ensuring a healthier future for the younger generations. Integrated homestead food production (IHFP) is one of the most promising pro-poor strategies to address undernutrition and specific nutritional deficits such as micronutrient deficiencies (Box 1). In a number of programmes in rural areas of all the developing regions, homestead gardens have been providing access to nutritious fresh food to households with relatively limited economic and productive assets. More recently, smallholder fish-farming has also become an important source of animal protein for poor households in rural areas.

This manual is intended for use by food security, nutrition, and livelihood programmers and practitioners for improved household food production and income generation. It represents a compilation of techniques and lessons learned from homestead gardening programs successfully implemented through the Consortium for Southern Africa Food Emergency (C-SAFE) in Lesotho. Many of the techniques described have been developed over time in a variety of countries and programs, and have been adapted in semi-arid and mountain climates in the southern lowlands of Lesotho. The success of the methodology has prompted Catholic Relief Services (CRS), Caritas Lesotho, and other partners to apply homestead gardening activities in other programs, such as the Mountain Orphan and Vulnerable Children Empowerment (MOVE) project.

A Training Manual for Community Workers in Growing, Preparing and Processing Nutritious Food

In 2006, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in close collaboration with the Food and Nutrition Council (FNC), the Nutrition Unit in the Ministry of Health and Child Care and AGRITEX in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development, developed the Healthy Harvest training manual as a tool for training community-based extension workers in good nutrition, the growing, preparing and processing of nutritious food. The manual has been used, since its publication, to train hundreds of government and NGO extension workers.

Most delegates at the 2020 Conference Leveraging Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health were expert or programmatically active in agriculture, nutrition, or health, but very few had specialist expertise that crossed sectoral boundaries. A major finding of the conference was that a key barrier to integration between agriculture, nutrition and health professionals was a lack of understanding of the sectors in which participants were not active, and lack of a common ‘language’ with which to debate. This brief report aims to outline basic concepts and definitions, tools and indicators, and common interventions used by each development sector, in order to provide a baseline level of knowledge and understanding on which to build dialogue and collaboration.