Nutrition, Food Security & Livelihoods
Nutrition: The Foundation of Life.
Nutrition is the foundation of life. About half of all deaths among children under 5 are linked to inadequate nutrition, including both chronic and acute malnutrition. Poor nutrition also carries enormous social and economic costs, leaving millions of children with stunted growth, compromised cognitive development and poor physical health—costing the global economy as much as $3.5 trillion per year, according to the World Health Organization. Childhood malnutrition reduces an individual’s future earnings by at least 10% and has a global economic cost of at least $1 trillion a year, caused by productivity loss. The tragedy is that malnutrition, if addressed in time, is both preventable and treatable.
Our approach to nutrition is holistic: we work to both prevent and treat malnutrition. We strengthen nutrition programs at the national, local and community levels in some of the world’s most challenging environments. Our prevention strategies focus on vulnerable groups—including adolescents, pregnant and lactating women, and children under 2. Our curative strategies center on children under 5 and pregnant and lactating women. Social and behavior change strategies underpin all of our nutrition work, building understanding and supporting optimal practices among all community members. Our food security and livelihood programs help these vulnerable groups grow nutrient-rich foods and diversify their diets.
Areas of Focus
Overview
Nutrition is pivotal to life and growth, but at no time is it more important than during the first 1,000 days of life, from conception until a child’s second birthday. Suboptimal nutrition during this window of opportunity deprives a child of reaching their full potential. It can cause impaired physical and cognitive development and can lead to increased nutrition-related morbidity and mortality, heightened risk of developing non-communicable diseases later in life, and decreased IQ and school performance, resulting in lower lifetime earnings.
Malnutrition during childhood can also affect generations to come. Malnourished adolescent girls might have a sub-optimal nutrition status during pregnancy, which leads to low-birthweight babies—who, in turn, may experience malnutrition during their childhood. Collectively, high levels of malnutrition among a country’s children can weaken the nation’s economic growth. All of this makes it important for a country to break this intergenerational cycle of malnutrition with appropriate nutrition and food security interventions.
Our integrated, nutrition-sensitive Food Security and Livelihoods (FSL) approach connects food access, income generation and improved dietary practices to achieve lasting resilience. We combine lifesaving assistance such as food, cash and vouchers to enhance food security, market access and household income.
Key Stats
Overview
Food security exists when people have physical, social and economic access to sufficient food on a sustained basis that meets their dietary needs for an active and healthy life. This definition is best summarized in the four pillars necessary to achieve food security: availability, access, utilization and stability.
Food availability depends on local production, imports, outside assistance, existing stocks and what is for sale in local markets. Access may involve economic access (having the money to buy food) or unfettered physical access. Utilization is the nutritious benefit gained from food, and the degree to which the body can absorb the nutrients, which depends on factors such as age, quality of the diet, a person’s health condition and the availability of potable water. Stability is a measure of how constant these three factors remain when food security is threatened.
Our Food Security programs aim to save lives and protect vulnerable households from resorting to negative coping mechanisms, such as selling productive assets to meet basic needs. They focus on enabling families, particularly women, to access and provide nutritious, diversified and micronutrient-rich foods while strengthening their capacity to maintain food security during and after crises.
Key Stats
Overview
A livelihood constitutes the ability to make a living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can survive the stress and shocks of the surrounding environment while not undermining the natural resource base.
For more than two decades, International Medical Corps has provided livelihood assistance that enables communities to recover from disasters. In the face of armed conflict or natural disaster, those most vulnerable are often forced to sell off their limited wealth—including livestock, seeds and household goods—to purchase necessities required for survival, such as food, medicine and clothing, or to pay for school fees and other essential services.
Because of this, protecting and promoting livelihoods is central to our mission to support swift recoveries from disaster and to enable communities to better survive future shocks. We help expand temporary income-earning opportunities—focusing, for example, on rebuilding, strengthening and diversifying the centers of wealth that communities draw upon for their livelihoods.
We support entrepreneurship and market-based livelihoods by providing opportunities for individuals and communities to build sustainable sources of income. Our programs include vocational and life-skills training, cash grants, cash-for-work and non-agricultural income-generating activities that enable people to restore and diversify their livelihoods. We also promote village savings-and-loan associations and other community-based financial initiatives to enhance economic resilience, particularly among women and young people. These efforts create local employment, reduce the need for migration and enhance self-reliance while integrating climate-adaptive practices and inclusive economic growth principles to ensure long-term sustainability.
Key Stats
Battling Child Malnutrition: One Home at a Time
In South Sudan, our community nutrition volunteers travel door-to-door to identify malnourished children and train caregivers on healthy practices.
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