Skip to content

Agriculture & Health

Improving sustainable and equitable economic development through agriculture and maximising its impact requires a focus on the intrinsic links between agriculture and the health of farmers and producing households.

Many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have economies that depend on agriculture and face challenges in both food security and health provision. Sustainable development models often have agriculture at their core, but what these models omit is how a productive and stable agricultural sector depends upon a healthy workforce.

There is ample evidence of the links between agriculture and health, especially in producing households and communities. For them, anything that affects agriculture has the potential to affect health and nutrition, and anything that affects health and nutrition has the potential to affect agriculture.

At KIT, we have a proven track record of working on agricultural development and innovations in LMICs and analysing change and the factors that drive it. We work on nutrition and the gender dynamics that influence it; on quantifying and understanding disease risk, prevention, and response. We support the development of innovative approaches in the design, monitoring, and evaluation of interventions on both agriculture and the health of producing households that recognise the intrinsic link between these domains as a means to secure and scale-up impact.

Our Approach

KIT’s framework for action and applied research is built upon the main pathways that link agriculture and the health of farmers and households. These pathways include the connections between:

    • Health & Agricultural Labour

    • Agricultural Practices & Health

    • Agricultural Production & Food Security and Nutrition

    • Health & Resource Allocation for Agriculture.

KIT_Agri-Health_Framework_White

(For more on the image download our position paper: Agriculture & Health are Inseparably Linked in Work Towards Sustainable & Economic Development)

Our framework and individual pathways can help spur action by supporting the design and planning of instruments and interventions in LMICs, the development of monitoring and evaluation tools, and the planning and implementation of learning approaches for impact management.

These mechanisms can also help the design and implementation of applied research to understand the health and agriculture risks of an intervention, measure the impact of policies, instruments, or interventions, and study the effects of external factors and shocks on agriculture and the health of farmers and producing households.

Our Agriculture & Health Services

Capacity-building

We help institutions, companies, organisations, and policymakers understand how agriculture and health are linked in the context(s) of their work, how these connections have consequences for their planned interventions, and how to identify the potential health risks and synergies in agricultural projects (and vice versa).

Design of interventions

Leveraging our field expertise, networks, and novel framework, we lead innovations in the design of interventions on health and agriculture on farming households and communities in LMICs. We support clients, partners, and founders on pragmatic approaches to intervention design that account for the synergy between agriculture and health to maximise impact.

Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning

We lead the design and implementation of fit-for-purpose methodologies and tools to assess, monitor and evaluate the effects of interventions on agriculture and the health of producing households in LMICs. We also help our clients develop learning approaches to collect insights on progress, challenges, and opportunities.

Applied Research

We apply our research on agriculture and health, generating knowledge for policy, implementation or advocacy. Our goal is to help fill research gaps on the interconnections between agriculture and health in different contexts and for different value chains, advance understanding of the effects of different interventions on agriculture and health of producing households, and to quantify and predict the effect of shocks on producing households and communities.

Contact us

Do you have a question or want to know more? Contact us by sending an e-mail.

Related Work

  • Nutrition Sensitive Value Chains in Nigeria

    • Institute
    • Project

    This project developed and tested the approach, tools and methods needed to carry out a Nutrition Sensitive Value Chain Analysis in northern Nigeria. It was implemented to support the IFAD-funded Climate Change and Agribusiness Support Program (CASP). Summary Based on a nutrition assessment conducted previously, the study team carried out in-depth analyses of five  commodity value […]

Publications

  • Bringing agriculture and nutrition together using a gender lens

    • Institute
    • Publication

    Working Paper Series 2015 – 6 The feminization of agriculture is well recognized: women are acknowledged as the main food producers in mainstream development policy and practice. However, women are disproportionally affected by hunger and malnourishment. A growing body of literature focuseson how to contribute to improved nutrition through agricultural interventions. ‘Women’s empowerment’ is often […]

  • A decision-support tool for the design of food & nutrition security programming

    • Institute
    • Publication

    Food & nutrition security is an important policy goal for national governments in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. Government policy makers, donors and other key actors are confronted with the complexity of factors that influence food security. These factors originate from different levels, from macro-economy and national policy, to a diversity of local actors. This complexity […]

  • Agriculture & Health are Inseparably Linked in Work Towards Sustainable & Economic Development

    • Institute
    • Publication

    This working paper presents a framework to account for the links between agriculture and health in low- and middle-income countries. It is aimed at supporting public and private sector donors as well as practitioners in the design of strategies, interventions, applied research, and action towards strengthening the resilience of farmers and households by improving agriculture […]

Sustainable Economic Development Topics

KIT MAG

KIT MAG: an annual magazine packed with stories about our activities, at our campus in Amsterdam and with partners worldwide.

Browse the magazine online or take a copy with you when you visit KIT (at the reception).

Knowledge Newsletter

Do you want to be up to date about our work? Then, join the long list of change-makers who have signed up for our newsletter.