Abstract:

The report highlights some of the lessons and outcomes arising from IFAD research grants to Bioversity for the NUS programme and allied Indigenous Peoples. It provides some reflections on the use of the term NUS with local communities and indicates five best practices to make a NUS project more nutrition sensitive. The study is intended to encourage IFAD funded projects and programmes to spontaneously search and document more of such transforming methods. It shows the Holistic Value Chain Approach for enhancing the use of NUS, developed thanks to IFAD-supported Grants and shows the various interdisciplinary and participatory interventions leading to resilience outcomes in nutrition, markets and peoples’ livelihoods in general. The study further illustrates suggested entry points for programmes and projects on ways to reinforce the contribution of NUS value chains for more nutrition-linked outcome and provide some overviews of ways to maximize nutrition in typical food value chains along with suggestions to strengthen the role of extension agents and practitioners in promoting NUS.