New report by FAO on a new indicator to measure women’s dietary diversity

In October 2015, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) published a scientific report titled “Moving Forward on Choosing a Standard Operational Indicator of Women’s Dietary Diversity’’ which details the scientific research leading to a new dietary diversity indicator for assessing diversity of women’s diets at individual level.

Dietary diversity is well-recognized as an important dimension of diet quality but is difficult to achieve in resource-poor settings where monotonous diets fail to meet many micronutrient needs. This is particularly crucial among vulnerable groups which include women of reproductive age. Dietary surveys that provide quantitative information on micronutrient adequacy of diets remain out of reach for most resource-poor countries which impedes assessment of needs, advocacy for programmatic actions and tracking of improvements.

The search for simpler population-level proxy indicators to reflect micronutrient adequacy of the diets of women of reproductive age, that can be collected via large-scale surveys, started in 2005 by the Women’s Dietary Diversity Project, coordinated by the International Food Policy Research Institute and funded by the United States Agency for International Development through the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistace project (FANTA). The results led to a follow-up project by FAO which is then described in this new report.

Learn more and download the report: FAO