The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Government of South Sudan, with funding from the World Bank, provided support to vulnerable households including those with malnourished children, mothers with children under five years and lactating mothers in Bahr el-Ghazal North and Central Equatoria in South Sudan to improve access to nutritious foods and diversify diets through locally produced foods.

In this project, 6 000 households were supported with vouchers to access milk, fish and fresh vegetables coupled with nutrition sensitization through improved food preparation and preservation techniques and adoption of basic agricultural skills to enable households make informed choices and adopt nutrition sensitive practices. This improved the nutritional status of their families since their expenditure on food decreased and availability of a variety of food, such as vegetables, increased.

Concurrently, the households were provided with investment vouchers to acquire poultry, goats or sheep that would be multiplied to secure their future household nutritional needs. They were also trained on basic animal husbandry skills. Households reported a variety of uses for the assets including feeding their children with goat milk, consuming eggs and benefitting from the marketing of their home-based production.

It is a unique project that entails the integrated approach of combining short and medium term strategies, showcasing FAO’s resilience strategy at work. For the remainder of the year FAO will be targeting to reach a further 5 000 households with nutrition vouchers. Also, to date, FAO has reached over 1.8 million people with emergency livelihood support in the form of seeds and tools, and fishing kits to improve local production.

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