Impact
Supporting Ethiopia’s inclusive economic growth goals and preventing maternal and child mortality through high impact nutrition interventions.
Despite significant progress over the past two decades, levels of maternal and child undernutrition in Ethiopia remain unacceptably high. Undernutrition has wide-ranging economic, health, and developmental consequences, including contributing to nearly one third of child deaths and significant yearly GDP loss, hindering Ethiopia's goal of achieving inclusive growth and becoming a lower-middle-income country by 2025. More than 39% of children under-five are stunted, 22% are underweight, and 11% are wasted. Similarly, maternal undernutrition is prevalent contributing to high maternal morbidity, poor birth outcomes, and reduced work productivity. Close to 20% of women are underweight and 50% have folate deficiencies, while 13% have anemia.
Addressing the Multisectoral Drivers of Undernutrition
The drivers of undernutrition are multisectoral and deeply rooted in gender, social, and cultural norms that impact behaviors. These challenges are exacerbated by manmade and natural disasters due to a wide range of hazards associated with the country’s diverse geo-climatic, socioeconomic conditions, and conflict.
The five-year (June 2023–June 2028) Feed the Future Ethiopia Community Nutrition Activity (also known as Community Nutrition), has been working to address these challenges, building on USAID’s previous nutrition investments. It is led by Family Health International (FHI 360) and implemented by a consortium of private and international non-profit partners, including RTI.
Objective of the Feed the Future Ethiopia Community Nutrition Activity
To increase and sustain improvements in high-impact nutrition behaviors that address maternal, infant, young child, and adolescent girls’ nutrition, and caretaker hygiene.
Community Nutrition’s Approach
To improve the nutritional status of women, young children, and adolescents, Community Nutrition is working to improve nutrition practices and increasing demand for health and nutrition services in local communities; strengthening the quality of nutrition services; and increasing capacity for coordination among nutrition stakeholders across sectors.
Community Nutrition Activities
RTI leads the research and evaluation component of Community Nutrition, including the baseline assessments and multisectoral research agenda. RTI is also implementing cross-cutting collaboration, learning, and adapting (CLA) activities to promote and apply learning and outcomes into all aspects of operations and programming.
In addition, RTI serves as the focal point for ensuring close collaboration and coordination between Community Nutrition and the Feed the Future Ethiopia Transforming Agriculture activity, implemented by RTI in the same geographic area, which aims to increase access to healthy diets by aligning foods systems with consumer preferences. The focus is on maintaining continuity in project messaging, identifying opportunities for coordinated, value-added delivery, and ensuring efficiencies, alignment, and cross-fertilization between the two projects’ research and learning agendas.
Learn more about RTI’s work in global food security, agriculture, and nutrition and in Ethiopia.