Achieving sustainable food and nutrition security calls for multi-sectoral coordination mechanisms in implementing, among others, nutrition-sensitive agricultural interventions. Despite progresses made in evaluating the effectiveness/impact of these interventions in some countries, very little is known about the nature and causal effect of these interventions in Ethiopia. Therefore, this systematic review aims to provide evidence on the impact of nutrition-sensitive agricultural interventions and pathways linking agriculture to improved nutrition. Based on a comprehensive advanced literature search using keywords in various databases and setting inclusion/screening criteria, we identify 25 relevant studies conducted between 2008 and 2018. Overall, we find positive effects on knowledge, attitude, and practice of complementary feeding and economic indicators (income, poverty and asset accumulation). We also find an overwhelming positive effect on food consumption, dietary diversity, and food security indicators. However, we also note mixed effectiveness in relation to child anthropometry. The most important pathways linking agriculture to improved nutrition center on its role as a source of food and income, and its effect on food prices/market. Hence, enhancing community-based nutrition education, accelerating adoption of improved technologies, improving access to farm inputs and technical information, integrating farmers to markets, and boosting enabling environments and capacities should be emboldened.

The surge in acute food insecurity due to conflict calls for sound evidence-based policymaking. Unfortunately, the knowledge on behaviours of households when they face a food shortage in these situations is under-reported in the literature. Our paper contributes to the covering of this gap by presenting the food consumption and livelihood-based coping mechanisms used by households in Western Bahr el Ghazal in South Sudan, distinguishing between rural areas and the Wau Protection of Civilian camp. We used a descriptive research design and unique primary data collected by the submission of a survey to a sample of 838 households from July–August 2020. In the alarming hunger situation in the investigated areas, households deeply use coping mechanisms independently of their food security status. The majority of them are at the breakdown of their coping ability. The behaviours used by households indicate a wider social catastrophe that the long-term consequences of these mechanisms can further accentuate. Food assistance resulted in a relatively better situation in the Wau Protection of Civilian camp. The paper confirms the centrality of a humanitarian-development-peace approach to food security in the investigated area, where the support of livelihood strategies and opportunities for households and the promotion of sound institutions have paramount roles.

This article investigates the factors most affecting year-to-year trends and month-to-month fluctuations in underweight among children under five years of age in the Dowa District of Malawi from 2004 to 2012, including both the ability of households to obtain and utilise food and to child-related policy interventions. Time series regressions reveal strong hungry-season effects associated with both food availability and disease transmission, in addition to trends in household health. These findings reveal the complex nature of child malnutrition in the Dowa District and the importance of a food and nutritional security approach in understanding and addressing this phenomenon.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, economic growth is essential for poverty reduction, and pro-poor growth is the renewed focus of today’s political debate. The present paper adds to the literature on the growth–inequality relationship. It provides an in-depth analysis of the potential role of agriculture in promoting pro-poor growth in rural and urban areas compared with that of other activities. This aspect still lacks rigorous empirical support. Using the Nexus project SAMs by the International Food Policy Research Institute, this study identifies the level of ‘keyness’ of 36 activities (12 are agricultural) in nine Eastern, Western, and Central African countries using the inter-industry linkages analysis. Afterwards, it investigates the income distribution multipliers effects of activities growth across households classified in quantiles in rural and urban areas. Therefore, the paper adds to the literature, mainly focused on rural poverty and information on the growth effect on urban poverty, which is important in the context of rapid urbanization and the growing number of poor people in African cities. Apart from country-specific factors, the results confirm the strong integration of agriculture with the economy. The growth of key agricultural activities presents the most pronounced multiplicative effect on the income of rural households in the lowest quantiles. Poor urban households also benefit from their growth, but not to the same extent as rural households with an increase in the rural–urban income gap.