• Measure what matters, not just what is easy to count: While agricultural programmes often track production, yields, and income, these indicators alone do not reveal whether interventions are improving diets and nutrition outcomes. Nutrition-sensitive agriculture requires measuring the pathways that link agriculture to better nutrition.
• Selecting the right indicators is critical: Indicators should align with a programme’s objectives and intended nutrition outcomes. Tools such as Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W), Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS), and women’s empowerment indicators help provide meaningful evidence of impact beyond agricultural productivity.
• Data should drive decision-making: Through the IGNITE+ project, Tanager is helping agricultural institutions strengthen their MERL systems and use tools such as the Nutrition-Sensitive Intervention Selection (NSIS) Tool to align interventions, nutrition pathways, and indicators ensuring that evidence generated informs programme improvement, accountability, and sustainable nutrition impact.

Across Africa, governments and development partners are investing heavily in agriculture to improve food security, livelihoods, and resilience. Yet one important question is often difficult to answer: Are these investments translating into better diets and improved nutrition outcomes?

At Tanager, through the IGNITE+ project, we are working with African agricultural institutions to strengthen their capacity to integrate gender and nutrition into their policies, programmes, systems, and ways of doing business. An important part of this work is helping institutions move beyond simply collecting data to using the right data to inform better decisions.

 

From Counting Activities to Measuring Change

Many agricultural programmes have traditionally focused on indicators such as yields, production, income, and market performance. While these measures remain important, they do not necessarily tell us whether households are consuming more diverse and nutritious diets or whether vulnerable groups are experiencing improved nutrition.

For nutrition-sensitive agriculture to deliver meaningful results, programmes need to understand the pathways through which agricultural interventions are expected to influence nutrition and measure progress along those pathways.

What change are we expecting to achieve, and what evidence will tell us whether we are getting there?

 

Choosing Indicators that Tell the Story

There is no single set of indicators that works for every agricultural programme. The right indicators depend on the intervention, its intended beneficiaries, available resources, and the pathway through which it is expected to influence nutrition.

For example, a programme supporting household vegetable gardens may measure production diversity to understand whether households are producing a wider variety of nutritious foods. But production alone does not tell us whether those foods are being consumed.

Complementary indicators such as Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) can provide insight into whether increased production is translating into more diverse diets.

Other indicators—including household dietary diversity, food provisioning, market access, women’s empowerment, and nutrition knowledge and practices can help programmes build a more complete picture of their contribution to nutrition.

 

How IGNITE+ is Supporting institutions Measure Nutrition Outcomes

Through IGNITE+, Tanager is helping agricultural institutions strengthen their capacity to integrate nutrition indicators into their Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning (MERL) systems.

Our approach goes beyond introducing organisations to measurement frameworks. Through technical assistance and training, institutions are supported to:

• Identify nutrition outcomes relevant to their programmes;
• Map activities to nutrition pathways;
• Select realistic and context-specific indicators;
• Assess their capacity and resources to collect and analyse data;
• Strengthen data collection and analytical systems; and
• Use evidence to inform programme adaptation and decision-making.

 

 

A key resource supporting this work is Tanager’s Nutrition-Sensitive Intervention Selection (NSIS) tool which helps programme teams connect the dots between interventions, nutrition pathways, expected outcomes, and indicators. This alignment is critical to ensuring that the data being collected is relevant to the changes a programme is trying to achieve.

Data is only valuable when it informs action. Institutions need to turn evidence into insights that guide decisions, strengthen accountability, demonstrate results, and improve programme effectiveness.

Read the full blog and explore how agricultural programmes can select the right nutrition indicators and strengthen their measurement systems: https://ikore.org/from-data-to-decisions-measuring-what-matters-in-nutrition-sensitive-agriculture/