ELEVATE Nutrition

Overview

The Enhancing Local Efforts for Vital, Transformative, and Evidence-Based Nutrition (ELEVATE Nutrition) Activity is a five-year cooperative agreement funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and led by FHI 360. ELEVATE Nutrition began on October 1, 2023, and aims to advance local implementation of high-quality nutrition programs and policies that improve the nutritional status of women and children, particularly in the first 1,000 days. The Activity takes a multisectoral approach to nutrition, focusing on bridging the gap between global evidence and local implementation.

Objectives

The Activity has three strategic objectives:

1. Sustained USAID global technical leadership in nutrition.
2. Enhanced delivery of evidence-based nutrition policies and programs.
3. Enhanced nutrition learning and knowledge transfer.

As part of achieving these objectives, ELEVATE Nutrition will promote sustained leadership across four key multi-sectoral nutrition areas – diet quality, prevention and management of wasting, social and behavior change and governance – in addition to providing demand driven technical assistance for countries’ nutrition priorities.

Approach

The ELEVATE Nutrition approach includes:

1. Expanding, curating, and sharing evidence to advance the knowledge needed for implementation, focused on packaging evidence-based interventions and improving knowledge on metrics and methodologies for multisectoral nutrition programming.
2. Providing responsive, context-specific technical assistance aligned with local priorities, enabling locally led implementation of high-quality, scalable programs and identifying sustainable opportunities for capacity strengthening.
3. Facilitating the operationalization and financing of national nutrition policies and quality programming through proven approaches and the use of digital tools and technologies.
4. Creating platforms and resources for straightforward access to learning and skill building that amplify local achievements in nutrition.

The Activity is grounded in USAID’s Collaborating, Learning and Adapting Framework and will emphasize building upon existing resources and platforms, employing localization principles and integrating gender and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility into all aspects of technical assistance.

Team

To implement ELEVATE Nutrition, FHI 360 will collaborate with partners Action Against Hunger, Bixal, Oxford Policy Management, Cultivating New Frontiers in Agriculture (CNFA) and GEMNet-Health. The team has expertise in evidence-based health, nutrition and food system programming in development and humanitarian settings, an established presence and robust operational platforms in USAID’s nutrition priority countries and experience leading USAID and other donor-funded global nutrition initiatives.