IYCN Update: Final Issue, March 2012

Welcome to the eleventh and final issue of the IYCN Update, a newsletter from USAID’s Infant & Young Child Nutrition (IYCN) Project.

A message from the project director

The IYCN team, July 2011
The IYCN team, July 2011

Greetings,

The IYCN Project has now completed activities in most of our countries and we will officially close on March 19, 2012. Over the past year, we have been enthusiastically documenting and sharing our experiences from five years of global maternal, infant, and young child nutrition programming. Highlights are included in this newsletter: 

  • A recently enhanced website, which will continue to offer a wealth of information and resources for several years.  
  • A roundup of our 2011 event series.  
  • Two publication series documenting our experiences and approaches.
  • An array of new materials, including a breastfeeding literature review plus a Q&A with the author.

Many thanks to our newsletter subscribers—more than 3,000 of you in 130 countries—for your valuable comments, questions, and contributions over the past several years. I have enjoyed engaging with many of you by email and face to face, and I am immensely grateful for your support. I hope our experience and tools will continue to assist you in your efforts to prevent malnutrition during the critical first 1,000 days.

I would also like to thank our communications team, Christine Demmelmaier and Jay Ward, for their outstanding work on this newsletter and our new website. 

Although this is our concluding newsletter, we are not saying our goodbyes just yet. Please look for another message to announce the arrival of our final report.

Warm regards,

Denise Lionetti
Project Director, IYCN Project 

IYCN Project news

Enhanced website offers a wealth of information and resources

IYCN recently launched an enhanced website to offer improved access to our project accomplishments and lessons learned, in addition to hundreds of resources. The website offers up-to-date information on the 16 countries where we worked, an improved resources database, and a collection of IYCN’s publication series (see links on the right). We will post final summaries of our legacy and accomplishments soon. Although it will no longer be updated after March 2012, the website will remain available for several years.

Please visit iycn.org.

Series of events to mark progress and look ahead

Over the past year, IYCN has hosted more than a dozen events—including a series of meetings in Washington, DC, and end-of-project gatherings in seven countries—to celebrate accomplishments, share experiences and resources, and discuss future directions for nutrition programming.

View highlights from our 2011 event series.

Documenting our experiences

We are pleased to share several new reports as part of our collection of country briefs launched last year. The collection offers a summary of IYCN’s experiences and accomplishments in each country where we worked.

View all country briefs.

Sharing our approaches 

We have also completed our series of four brief documents examining our approaches in selected countries. New publications include:

  • Mobilizing social workers to prevent malnutrition in Côte d’Ivoire.
  • Promoting breastfeeding as an option for HIV-positive mothers in Haiti.

 View the series.

Featured resource: Review of breastfeeding literature

Our latest literature review examines evidence on community interventions to promote optimal breastfeeding. We are grateful to our colleague Dr. Miriam Labbok, Director of the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for expertly composing this publication. Dr. Labbok shared her thoughts on the findings of the review in a recent Q&A.

See the Q&A with Dr. Labbok.

Download Community interventions to promote optimal breastfeeding: Evidence on early initiation, any breastfeeding, exclusive breastfeeding, and continued breastfeeding.

More new IYCN resources

Global

Côte d’Ivoire

Ethiopia reports

Ethiopia training materials and tools

 Ghana

Haiti

Kenya

Madagascar

Malawi

 

Photos: PATH/Mike Wang; PATH/Evelyn Hockstein; PATH/Evelyn Hockstein