The “Adolescent Nutrition Resource Bank”: Practical resources for improving adolescent nutrition programmes
Adolescence is a critical time in the lifecycle, presenting a ‘second window of opportunity’ in an individual’s growth and development. During this time, adolescents build confidence, learn to act independently and make important decisions related to their diet, eating and self-care practices. Addressing the nutritional needs of adolescents presents unique challenges due to the significant variations in their household, school, employment, marital and parental circumstances. It requires the engagement, coordination and joint programming of multiple sectors including health, education, agriculture, food systems, water and sanitation and social protection.
To help to accelerate the design, development, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of adolescent nutrition programmes throughout the world, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Advancing Nutrition, the Agency’s flagship multi-sector nutrition project, has developed the Adolescent Nutrition Resource Bank (ANRB).1 The ANRB is a repository of policies, programme examples, guidance and tools to help adolescent nutrition stakeholders – governments, United Nations agencies, USAID and other donors, development partners, private sector entities, faith-based and youth-led organisations, civil society organisations, service providers, communities and adolescents – to improve and expand adolescent nutrition programmes and services. The ANRB was launched during a webinar2 in March 2021. Since then, many participants have engaged with and contributed to this resource bank.
The ANRB contains more than 200 documents with new resources regularly added. All the resources on the ANRB are tagged according to various characteristics, such as the technical areas of focus or the language of publication, and users can filter these characteristics to locate resources that suit their needs. To populate the ANRB, USAID Advancing Nutrition built on adolescent nutrition resources collected under the USAID-supported Strengthening Partnerships, Results and Innovations in Nutrition Globally (SPRING) project and sought resources from organisations that had signed the 2018 Adolescent Nutrition Call to Action3.
We continue to identify documents through online database searches and the review of selected websites for the latest adolescent nutrition materials and peer-reviewed literature as well as programme reports and other grey literature.
If you have resources to share through the ANRB, please contact USAID Advancing Nutrition at info@advancingnutrition.org
To find more information on the ANRB, or to conduct your own search for resources, please access https://www.advancingnutrition.org/resources/adolescent-resource-bank.
1 https://www.advancingnutrition.org/resources/adolescent-resource-bank
2 https://www.advancingnutrition.org/events/2021/02/25/webinar-usaid-advancing-nutrition-adolescent-nutrition-resource-bank-launch
3 https://www.spring-nutrition.org/about-us/news/adolescent-nutrition-call-action-better-data-now-drive-better-policies-and-programs