Kennedy, Eileen

Collaborative Research Support Programs (CRSPs) represent a long?standing form of US government funding for research that facilitates partnerships among US?based and developing?country scholars on agriculture, food and nutrition issues of policy relevance globally. The CRSPs receive core funding from the Bureau for Food Security of USAID, as well as buy?ins from USAID Missions and other parts of the Agency. The Nutrition CRSP is the most recently?established of 10 existing CRSPs.

The Government of Nepal (GoN) has made a major commitment to improving the nutritional status of its population. For example, Nepal was one of the earliest countries to join the Scaling up Nutrition (SUN) Movement. As a SUN country, Nepal has articulated a clear strategy for scaling up direct nutrition interventions as well as identifying multi-sector strategies for improving nutrition. To this end, GoN in September 2012 released its Multi-Sector Nutrition Plan (MSNP) that will guide the government?s investment for the period 2013 to 2017.

Recently, there have been renewed calls for the integration of nutrition, health, and agriculture to improve the nutritional status of populations. Whereas these sectors previously operated in separate realms, various frameworks have been propounded to highlight the importance of a multi?sectoral approach and to establish links between the sectors to impact nutritional status.

In the last few years, there has been a proliferation of interest in how to leverage agriculture to maximize its impacts on nutrition, particularly among mothers and children (USAID 2011; Herforth 2012). The belief that ?agriculture contributes not just to food production, but also to human nutrition and health? (IFPRI 2012) is widely held, and it underpins ongoing efforts globally to ?make agricultural policies and programs nutrition-sensitive.?(BMGF 2012) However, the search for solid empirical findings of ?what works?