On April 16, The Chicago Council launched a new report, Healthy Food for a Healthy World: Leveraging Agriculture and Food to Improve Global Nutrition, at the Global Food Security Symposium 2015. Each week, we will highlight one of the report’s recommendations in a new post on the Global Food for Thought blog. This blog series explores how the strengths and ingenuity of the agriculture and food sector can reduce the reality and risks of malnutrition globally. Watch for a new post each Wednesday, and join the discussion using #GlobalAg. 

Peace Corps volunteers are valuable assets at the field level in development. They serve in “last mile” communities, working side-by-side with their local counterparts in health and agriculture extension services, train-the-trainer programs, and economic development programs. Providing nutrition training to these volunteers could help increase the nutrition sensitivity of their activities in agriculture, natural resources, health, and economic development. Furthermore, it is important to ensure that Peace Corps volunteers are provided opportunities to share their nutrition training with professionals and community members in the countries in which they are serving.

In Ghana, for example, Peace Corps volunteers established a school garden to improve diet diversity and nutrition for children in the community. Where students’ diets were previously made up of rice, maize porridge, beans, and cassava, the volunteers’ community garden added vegetables to the diets of 600 children.

Peace Corps volunteers are also well placed to promote changes in nutrition behaviors because they live and work so closely with the urban and rural communities where they serve. By incorporating social behavior change efforts into their sectoral activities, Peace Corps volunteers can encourage consumption of nutritious foods. For example, efforts to change social behavior can be incorporated into economic development projects to help channel increased incomes towards healthier foods for families.