DRC Multisectoral Nutrition and Health Project

active

The objective of Multisectoral Nutrition and Health Project for Democratic Republic of Congo is to increase the utilization of nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions targeting children 0-23 months of age and pregnant and lactating women in the project regions and to respond to an eligible crisis or emergency. The project has 4 components. (1) Improving the delivery of community interventions and social and behavioral change component will support the government in implementing the NAC approach - a standardized community-level delivery platform and package of services whose scale-up could be financed by the Government and development partners either individually or through pooled financing mechanisms. (2) Improving service supply and strategic purchasing component will focus on improving the supply (quantity and quality) of key nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions delivered through primary health care facilities and facilitate access to FP counseling and methods through nonstate actors, such as NGO. (3) Convergence demonstration project component will demonstrate the added value of multisectoral convergence to improve nutrition outcomes. The demonstration project will provide unconditional cash transfers to pregnant women and mothers of children 0-23 months of age to improve access to adequate quantity and quality of foods. Targeted cash transfers are a strategy recommended in the most recent DRC SCD (2018) to improve social safety nets. To restore the productive capacity of the households of vulnerable women and children and prevent their relapse into food insecurity and malnutrition, the demonstration project will complement the cash transfers with food production kits for households with food production capacity. The demonstration pilot will also finance the scale-up of the locally-developed biofortified varieties of key crops. (4) Capacity strengthening and project management component will serve two objectives: (i) to build the capacity at the central, regional, and local levels to ensure sustainable strengthening of country systems so that activities financed under components 1, 2, and 3 are implemented successfully; and (ii) to provide the Government and the World Bank with evidence-based analysis on various aspects of service delivery in the nutrition sector which leads to sound recommendations for improvement.