Successful Community Nutrition Programming: Lessons from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda

From the Executive Summary
This report brings together the main findings of a series of assessments of successful community nutrition programming carried out in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda between 1999 and 2000. The overall aim of the assessments was to identify key lessons, or the main driving forces behind the successful processes and outcomes in these programmes. Such elements of success fundamentally have to do with both what was done and how it was done.Experience with community-based nutrition programming, as documented in various syntheses and reviews during the 1990s, does show that malnutrition can be effectively addressed on a large scale, at reasonable cost, through appropriate programmes and strategies, and backed up by sustained political support.

In most cases, successful attempts to overcome malnutrition originate with participatory, community-based nutrition programmes undertaken in parallel with supportive sectoral actions directed toward nutritionally at-risk groups. Such actions are often enabled and supported by policies aimed at improving access by the poor to adequate social services, improving women's status and education, and fostering equitable economic growth.

Successful community-based programmes are not islands of excellence existing in an imperfectworld. Rather, part of their success has to do with contextual factors that provide anenabling or supportive environment. Some of these contextual factors are particularly influenced by policy, some less so. Contextual factors may include, for example, high literacy rates, women's empowerment, community organisational capacity and structures,appropriate legislation. Nutrition programme managers cannot normally influence contextual factors, at least in the short term.