Introduction by Frederick Grant The Scaling Up Sweetpotato Through Agriculture and Nutrition (SUSTAIN) project was a 5-year undertaking running from July 2013 to June that was led by the International Potato Center (CIP) and funded by UK Department for International Development (DFID). It was mainly implemented in four sub-Saharan African countries, i.e. Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Rwanda, with some activities in Tanzania and Bangladesh. In Rwanda, SUSTAIN worked in eight districts. It supported integrated interventions in the agriculture, nutrition, utilization, and marketing of orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) to reinforce its production and consumption. One of the outputs defined for SUSTAIN was to contribute to the "Access to improved nutritional knowledge and diversified use of OFSP by both female and male caregivers". To accomplish that, community health workers delivered nutrition messages to SUSTAIN beneficiaries through community sessions and home visits. A survey was conducted to assess the association between nutrition behavior change messaging in the SUSTAIN project and improvement in nutrition outcomes among the beneficiaries. The Feed the Future OFSP activity, funded by USAID, had a nutrition outcome similar to that of the SUSTAIN project that aimed to "increase dietary diversity, feeding frequency and nutrition knowledge" among households with children under 5 years of age. The Feed the Future activity was implemented in 10 districts in Rwanda. In Tanzania the Viable Sweetpotato Technologies in Africa (VISTA-Tanzania) project was implemented in seven districts in four regions. The nutrition outcomes for Tanzania were similar to those of the Feed the Future activity in Rwanda. The Regional Technical Committee meeting of SUSTAIN in Kigali, held in September 2018, was organized to disseminate the results from the analyses of data from surveys, monitoring, and focus group discussions on SUSTAIN and VISTA-Tanzania projects. These analyses were conducted to provide insight into the implementation of the projects and also to shed light on the likely reasons for the observations made in the quantitative analysis. Results from field discussions with CIP partners-local and international NGOs, local government institutions, national and international organizations, the private sector, and donors-were also shared. The meeting was expected be a forum for sharing of experiences regarding the implementation of the nutrition activities and the lessons learnt, for application in improving future programs. It was anticipated also that recommendations would be generated for designing programs for effective social and behavioral change communication linked to agricultural innovations in order to strengthen nutrition-sensitive agricultural programs, particularly those implemented by the CGIAR and those of its partners and governments. Opening Robert Ackatia-Armah welcomed the participants to the workshop and reviewed the agenda for the two days. He expressed his hope that the sharing of experiences and the other int...
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