IFPRI Egypt Seminar: Improving Nutrition in Egypt: What is the Role of Agriculture and How do we Document Impact?”

November 16th, 2016

Time: 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm

 Location: Conrad Hotel 1191 Nile Corniche | Cairo - Egypt

The Seminar Series provides a platform for all people striving to identify and implement evidence-based policy solutions that sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition. The series is part of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded project called “Evaluating Impact and Building Capacity” (EIBC) that is implemented by IFPRI. It features research-based presentations by top local and international experts on key development topics. Recording and publishing all the events online will create a knowledge repository to inform policy making in Egypt and beyond.

"Improving Nutrition in Egypt: What is the Role of Agriculture and How do we Document Impact?"

The current global evidence-base regarding the nutritional impacts of nutrition-sensitive programs, including popular ones such as agriculture development programs and social safety nets, is generally limited because of poor targeting, design, and implementation of programs and, equally important, sub-optimal evaluation designs.  Although there is a consensus regarding the need to invest in nutrition-sensitive programs in order to address the underlying causes of undernutrition and to improve the effectiveness, reach, and scale, the evidence of what works, how and at what cost is extremely limited.  Empirical evidence is particularly rare regarding the role of agriculture for improving nutrition and especially the impact of large-scale agribusiness-promoting programs.

This seminar will focus on how to design and carry out rigorous process, cost, and impact evaluations of complex nutrition-sensitive programs; and it aims to de-mystify some of the perceived insurmountable challenges that have prevented investments in rigorous evaluations of such programs in the past.  By doing so, we hope that the evidence gap in nutrition-sensitive programming, which has characterized the past decades of development, will quickly be filled and that future investments will benefit from a strong body of evidence on what works to improve nutrition, how it works and at what cost.