Infant and Young Child Nutrition (IYCN)

Overview

The Infant and Young Child Nutrition  (IYCN) project is improving the nutritional status of mothers, infants, and young children and the HIV-free survival of children. IYCN focuses on proven interventions that are effective from the start of pregnancy through the first two years of life. URC provides technical assistance in monitoring and evaluation, quality improvement, HIV and infant feeding training, and job aid development.

The IYCN website, http://www.iycn.org, provides training tools, publications, and other resources on maternal nutrition, breastfeeding, complementary feeding, and infant feeding.

Key Activities

• Develop job aids and training curricula to train community- and facility-based health workers,
• Integrate quality improvement principles into nutritional assessment and counseling in health facilities and communities, and
• Pilot and test new monitoring and evaluation tools to improve the quality of infant-feeding counseling and support.

Achievements

URC provided technical support to:

• Launch the National Infant and Young Child Feeding Training Curriculum for health workers in Lesotho in 2010;
• Develop nationally validated infant and young child feeding counseling cards for health workers in Haiti;
• Build the capacity of health workers and community-based workers to counsel and support mothers on infant and young child nutrition;
• Develop a model to integrate quality improvement principles into nutrition, assessment, and counseling support in health facilities and communities; and
• Strengthen monitoring and evaluation systems for country nutrition programs, including the development of health worker supervision checklists and rapid assessment tools for country programs.