USAID Large-Scale Food Fortification Programming Guide: Supporting Food Fortification at a Country Level and on a Global Scale
For as much as a third of the world’s population, diets are inadequate in essential vitamins and minerals — micronutrients — due to a lack of availability and access to diverse, nutritious foods. This is especially true for the most vulnerable, including women and children and where crises such as COVID-19 reduce purchasing power, disrupt supply chains and elevate food prices. In response, families resort to greater reliance on cheaper staples and condiments, which generally are lacking in micronutrients, but can be enriched by the addition of key micronutrients through food fortification during processing. There is a century of experience fortifying foods, including salt with iodine, cooking oil and sugar with vitamin A, and flours and rice with iron, zinc and B-vitamins, the costs of which are mostly covered by the food industry and passed on to consumers through market prices.
USAID, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and other global partners, has renewed its commitment to support food fortification on a global scale as a key approach to addressing dietary adequacy through food systems programming. This includes the development of a USAID Large-Scale Food Fortification Programming Guide. The guide, centered on a results framework, is meant to serve as a tool for Bureaus, Missions and development partners across government, the private sector and civil society to assess their specific needs and strategic opportunities, to design, implement, monitor and evaluate, and adjust large-scale food fortification programming for countries based on their local context. The programming guide is comprehensive and will support users in fulfilling the Agency’s vision for sustainable, large-scale food fortification that will contribute to improving access to adequate, affordable diets across countries.