USAID Mission [http://www.usaid.gov/bd/ ]

Bangladesh

[2009-Present]

Malnutrition affects nearly half of all mothers and children in Bangladesh. And, because many mothers are young and malnourished during pregnancy, malnutrition is passed on to their children—making the problem intergenerational. Addressing the life cycle of malnutrition, with a special focus on maternal, child, and adolescent malnutrition, is essential to achievement of one of the Millennium Development Goals for Bangladesh, namely, cutting the rate of poverty and malnutrition in half by 2015.

At the request of USAID, FANTA-2 provides technical assistance to the Government of Bangladesh and other USAID partners to strengthen maternal and child nutrition programming in the health sector. FANTA-2’s approach has five components:

• Implementing a multifaceted advocacy strategy to increase attention to and government support of maternal and child nutrition by working with the Government of Bangladesh, the media, and local and international NGOs

• Integrating maternal and child nutrition services into government and nongovernment health service programs

• Developing and deepening innovative social and behavior change communication in maternal and child nutrition, especially by increasing male involvement and focusing on adolescent girls

• Supporting and strengthening the capacity of the Government of Bangladesh and key local institutions in maternal and child nutrition programming

• Conducting innovative research on food-based supplements to prevent chronic malnutrition

FANTA-2 works with many partners in Bangladesh, including:

• Alive and Thrive
• Bangladesh Breastfeeding Foundation
• Bangladesh National Nutrition Council
• Helen Keller International
• ICDDR,B
• Institute of Governance Studies at BRAC University
• Institute of Public Health Nutrition, Government of Bangladesh
• Lutheran Aid to Medicine, Bangladesh
• Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Bangladesh
• RTM International
• Save the Children/US
• Smiling Sun Franchise
• The Asia Foundation
• USAID

Measuring Dietary Diversity in Rural Bangladesh: In a separate research activity, FANTA, responding to the need for simple indicators to assess the quality of women’s diets,  in 2006 formed the Women’s Dietary Diversity Project (WDDP), a collaborative research initiative among the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), FANTA (now FANTA-2), Akershus University College, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Institute of Research for Development (IRD), Iowa State University, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wageningen University. The WDDP’s work includes development of a standard analysis protocol, a multi-site investigation into how well dietary diversity indicators measure micronutrient adequacy and in-depth site-specific analyses of women’s diet patterns.  This research resulted in the summary report Dietary Diversity as a Measure of the Micronutrient Adequacy of Women’s Diets in Resource-Poor Areas: Results from Five Countries as well as individual reports on Bangladesh and the four other countries studied: Burkina Faso, Mali, Mozambique and the Philippines.

USAID Country Profile
[http://www.usaid.gov/locations/asia/countries/bangladesh/]

UNICEF Country Profile
[http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/bangladesh_bangladesh_latest.html]

WFP Country Profile
[http://www.wfp.org/countries/bangladesh]

Demographic and Health Surveys Country Survey
[http://www.measuredhs.com/countries/country_main.cfm?ctry_id=1&c=Bangladesh]

FAO Country Food Security Statistics
[http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/ess/documents/food_security_statistics/ country_profiles/eng/Bangladesh_E.pdf]

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