Early Training Lays the Foundation for Future Collaboration The training of professionals in agriculture, nutrition, and health has traditionally taken place in compartments, with few linkages. By the time professionals in the three sectors have completed their education, they no longer speak the same “language.” Given that the goal of each of the sectors is to improve human well-being, students and young professionals should be trained in how the three sectors are tied together. Even though professionals in the three sectors should retain a deep expertise in their subject area, they could be given a greater familiarity with the main concerns and opportunities of the other sectors. By developing cross-disciplinary programs, educational institutions can produce graduates and professionals who—in their capacity as extension workers, healthcare pro- viders, or nutrition counselors—can effectively translate the linkages between agriculture, health, and nutrition in the field for the benefit of all.39


There are few systematic reviews of agricultural projects with explicit goals related to nutri- tion and health, and the reviews that do exist often show only weak links—perhaps because the links are in fact weak or because research- ers have not found the best ways of evaluating such programs. An important job for research- ers is to determine not only what works, but why. There is still little understanding of pre- cisely how agriculture affects nutrition and health, and filling this knowledge gap would be


not to understand one another’s concerns and objectives. There is a great need for a shared language and a shared set of indicators for measuring results.


Evaluating interventions that seek to in-


tegrate agriculture, nutrition, and health is also difficult for the same reason that other evaluations are difficult. Experiments that randomly assign people to intervention groups and control groups are ideal for measuring the


“We need to have real-time monitoring of results. We can’t wait five years to see if we’ve been doing things the right way. We need to be able to assess and adjust regularly.”


—Diane Jacovella, Canadian International Development Agency


of real value for decisionmakers trying to de- sign the most effective programs and policies.40


The effort to amass more evidence on how


best to use the links between the three sectors faces a real challenge. The agriculture, nutri- tion, and health communities use completely different methods and indicators to measure impact, and the different communities tend


results of an intervention, but this method is not always feasible. It is important to remem- ber that many other kinds of rigorous evalua- tion are also possible, including anthropological techniques and modeling. Adding nutrition and health indicators to the data that are regularly collected in developing countries would also help a great deal.41


“Sectors don’t matter, projects don’t matter. Results matter.” —Joachim von Braun, Center for Development Research (ZEF)


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