Policy seminar: What made Malawi’s community childcare centers successful platforms for an agriculture and nutrition program

Community-based early childhood development centers have long provided affordable, quality care for preschoolers across Malawi—but many of those communities also face chronic poverty and food insecurity. Recently, Save the Children tested using the centers as a platform for a package of integrated agriculture and nutrition behavior change interventions. IFPRI and partners conducted a longitudinal cluster-randomized controlled trial examining the interventions’ impacts—and based on the results, the government scaled up the program.

A Nov. 6 policy seminar explored the research—the Nutrition Embedded Evaluation Programme Impact Evaluation (NEEP-IE)—that led to this unprecedented scale-up of an integrated agriculture-nutrition program. The event was co-organized by IFPRI, the University of Washington-led Strengthening Economic Evaluation for Multisectoral Strategies for Nutrition (SEEMS) project, and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health (A4NH), and moderated by IFPRI Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division Deputy Director Dan Gilligan.

Photo Credit: Jamed Falik/IFPRI