Growing and Learning Together in Fostering Multisectoral Participation for Sustaining Interventions: Lessons from 3 Successive Integrated Multidisciplinary Interventions in Rural Ghana.

Despite the recognition of nutrition as a multisectoral development issue, institutional silos persist as barriers to addressing community nutrition challenges effectively and sustainably. Over the past 2 decades, 3 integrated agriculture, livelihood, nutrition, and health interventions have been implemented in rural communities across Ghana, aimed at nurturing multisectoral collaborations to enhance institutional capacity, women's empowerment, children's diets and nutritional status, and general household well-being. Using information from published articles on the interventions, workshop reports, informal institutional engagements, and field notes, insights are presented on the efforts to garner multisectoral participation to sustain these interventions.

An agriculture-nutrition intervention improved children's diet and growth in a randomized trial in Ghana.

Stunting in Ghana is associated with rural communities, poverty, and low education; integrated agricultural interventions can address the problem. This cluster randomized controlled trial tested the effect of a 12-month intervention (inputs and training for poultry farming and home gardening, and nutrition and health education) on child diet and nutritional status. Sixteen clusters were identified and randomly assigned to intervention or control; communities within clusters were randomly chosen, and all interested, eligible mother-child pairs were enrolled (intervention: 8 clusters, 19 communities, and 287 households; control: 8 clusters, 20 communities, and 213 households).