The Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) indicator was developed by FAO and partners to fill the need for a low-cost food-based indicator for assessing dietary diversity as a proxy for dietary micronutrient adequacy. MDD-W is a simple yes/no indicator of whether or not women of reproductive age (aged 15 to 49 years) have consumed at least five out of ten defined food groups in the previous 24 hours. The higher the proportion of women in the sample reaching this threshold, the higher the chance that women in the population are consuming micronutrient adequate diets.   

Assessing dietary diversity 

MDD-W assesses dietary diversity—an important aspect of diet quality. Diet quality is a multi-dimensional concept that includes adequacy (consuming sufficient nutrients or food groups according to requirements), moderation (of foods that should be consumed sparingly), overall balance (of different nutrients) and dietary diversity. As no one food can provide all the nutrients needed for a healthy life, eating a wide variety of foods increases the chances that a diet covers nutrient requirements.  

Since measuring all aspects of diet quality can be resource intensive and complex and is not routinely done in low and middle-income countries, simple tools to measure dietary diversity such as MDD-W can provide a snapshot of one aspect of diet quality, and translate data into understandable, validated, actionable, and comparable measurements.

How MDD-W can be used 

MDD-W can be used to evaluate the impact of programmes, inform policies and set targets. It is easily integrated into large-scale surveys, existing data collection platforms, monitoring and evaluation frameworks and research studies measuring dietary diversity. To date, MDD-W has been collected in over 85 countries though the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Gallup World Poll, and has been incorporated into the corporate monitoring systems of several international organizations such as the World Food Programme and USAID.  

FAO’s work  

Since developing and launching the MDD-W indicator in 2015, FAO and partners have worked to develop and update guidance, generate scientific evidence and evidence on good practices, and produce, collect, and share MDD-W data and results. This data helps us understand what people are eating, identify population groups at risk of malnutrition, and inform and monitor policies and programmes. A key area of our work is providing technical assistance and building capacity to collect and interpret MDD-W data in low and middle-income countries, such as through supporting countries to integrate MDD-W into monitoring systems and surveys.