Agriculture to nutrition Ethiopia project

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Agriculture to Nutrition (ATONU) project seeks to help the African continent broaden its agricultural focus from ‘eating for hunger’ to ‘eating for health’. It focuses on how agriculture can deliver positive nutrition outcomes for smallholder farming families through the implementation of robust, evidence-based nutrition-sensitive interventions.

Working closely with the African Chicken Genetic Gains (ACGG) project—led by the International Livestock Research Institute—and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, the ATONU project operates in 20 villages in Ethiopia (in the regions of Amhara; Oromia; Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples; and Tigray) and 20 villages in Tanzania (in the central, southern highlands and eastern zones). Project interventions target 1,600 women and young children in their first 1,000 days—40 per village—where high nutritional demands of pregnancy, development and early childhood must largely be met through food grown, or income earned, on family farms in the two countries.