Impact Area and Outcome

Our impact area is the building and strengthening resilient agri-food systems for food and nutrition security. The desired outcome is improved farm productivity, diversity and access to locally grown, culturally important, safe, and nutritious foods.

Context

Rural areas of Nepal are characterised by inaccessibility, marginality, fragility and vulnerability primarily due to their remoteness. Recurrent food and nutrition insecurity is common, and great disparity exists within the province. The key factors contributing to food and nutrition insecurity include: low productivity; unsustainable production and consumption practices leading to the loss of agrobiodiversity, traditional knowledge and degradation of soil fertility; poor access to production inputs, especially access to quality seeds; increased impact of climate change; gender-neutral policies; underutilization of nutritious indigenous crops and wild edible plants (despite their local abundance and potential to improve family food and nutrition); poor nutritional awareness and inadequate access to nutritious food; and out-migration of labour force. Women, children, landless/land-poor, indigenous people, Dalits, other ethnic minorities and people with disability are undernourished and are the most vulnerable. Our focus will be to strengthen the local basis and up-scale locally-led and adapted solutions for improving their food and nutrition security.

The programme will contribute to the national policies and priorities, particularly the Right to Food and Food Sovereignty, Multi-Sector Nutrition Plan, and national action plan related to SDG 1, 2 and 12.

Key Strategic Actions

To achieve this outcome in this strategy period, we will:

• Develop, demonstrate, and up-scale tailored food and nutrition solutions based on local food systems assessment that integrate agriculture, livestock and agroforestry approaches, technologies and practices, employ principles of agroecology and are gender and nutrition-sensitive;
• Enhance on-farm conservation and sustainable use of agrobiodiversity for food and nutrition security with a focus on neglected and underutilised species through up-scaling participatory plant breeding and participatory varietal selection methodologies using farmer field school approach, and promote promising landraces, climate-resilient and nutritious crop varieties in the production system;
• Strengthen farmer-managed seed systems to improve availability and access to quality seeds and planting materials through community seed banks and farmer’s feed enterprises; and
• Establish, promote, and strengthen women and youth-led farm-based enterprises to up-scale production, utilisation and marketing of locally grown, safe and nutritious foods through value addition, product diversification, market system development, and improving access to financial services.