Though peace was declared in 2003, Liberia continues to struggle to recover after 15 years of civil war. Addressing widespread poverty, providing employment for youth and ex-combatants and increasing domestic food production are all substantial needs. Though Liberia has no shortage of fertile land, many people, especially youth, see farming as an occupation of last resort rather than a viable business opportunity. Consequently, Liberia has to import most of its food, resulting in inconsistent supplies and high prices. On average, Liberian households spend 70 percent of their income on food—a situation that will only worsen as global food prices continue to rise, unless local agricultural production increases dramatically. Through the Agriculture for Children’s Empowerment (ACE) Project, ACDI/VOCA is addressing these needs by engaging youth and demonstrating that farming can be a profitable enterprise.

The ACE Project is developing entrepreneurship and bringing farmers into profitable value chains with the goal of increasing income, improving nutrition and enabling caregivers to better support their children. The project aims to:

• increase local production of key staple foods by supporting paddy rice development in four communities in Bong and Nimba counties, and vegetable production in two communities in Montserrado County;

CARE designed the "5x5 model" to illustrate and integrate critical early childhood needs into a simplified holistic and replicable program, capable of delivering early childhood development interventions in resource constrained areas through community based childcare centers catering for the 2-8 year old age group. This document is part of the "Promising Practices" series.

During the past few decades, Bangladeshi children under age 10 have experienced significant improvements in nutrition, and sex differences in child nutrition have declined significantly regardless of family structure, a major change from previous observations in Matlab. However, our attempts to understand child nutritions in develop countries are hindered by problems with the measures used to evaluate health. The anthropometric proxies commonly used to judge nutrition (MBI, weight-for-age and height-for-age) often fail to capture the true health status of children in undernourished populations. Further the standard of comparison based on U.S. children misclassifies a large number of children in Banglades as malnourished, especially in the adolescent years. We explore nutrition in Matlab, Bangladesh, using measures of acute and chronic morbidity to assess whether and how anthropometric indicators of nutrition accurately reflect the health of children in this population.

This report summarizes the findings of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)-commissioned study, "Impacts on Children from Microfinance Initiatives." The results of the study showed that when family income improves, the priority areas of spending are generally those that benefit children. Education is the highest priority for spending, followed by health care. Housing and nutrition are other areas of spending that were identified by the study participants.