Nutrition and social protection: a powerful duo

Social protection instruments and programmes are powerful tools for improving nutrition. They can increase food consumption, improve food safety and prevent foodborne illnesses, enhance food utilization, and facilitate access to healthy diets.

Achieving these benefits requires the development of nutrition-sensitive social policies and programmes that address immediate and underlying causes of food insecurity and malnutrition.

Furthermore, integrating social protection with other interventions across the agrifood systems is essential. This includes promoting economic inclusion by relocating labour or increasing agricultural production, or the adoption of climate adaptive agricultural practices.

FAO provides valuable technical assistance and capacity building to countries in designing, implementing, monitoring, and evaluating nutrition-sensitive social protection policies and programmes, ensuring they are tailored to local needs.

We invite you to explore this selection of FAO materials to deepen your knowledge on the topic.

Tools

• This Inter-agency social protection assessment  tool on food security and nutrition (FSN ISPA) Also available in Arabic, French, Russian and Spanish.

Publications

• Enhancing diets and resilience- Results from a rapid assessment and microsimulation stufy of a Cash+ pilot project in Armenia
• Nutrition-sensitive social protection programmes within food systems
• Rapid assessment and microsimulation of impacts of a Cash+ pilot intervention in Kyrgyzstan

E-learning

• Two courses available about how to make social assistance programmes work for nutrition: the ISPA-FSN tool : Course on the linkages between food security, nutrition and social protection and Assessing social assistance programmes for better food security and nutrition,  Also available in French and Spanish.

Videos

• Nutrition sensitive social protection across the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus (webinar)
• Introduction to the ISPA-FNS tool
• Homegrown school feeding: increased market access for smallholders through social protection