This report to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was meant to be of assistance as the Foundation considered alternative places and pathways for investment in communication to improve the nutritional status of young children in Ethiopia. The authors spent several months in background research and interviews with experts before a relatively brief (half-month) field trip to Ethiopia where they met with a wide variety of individuals engaged in activities relevant to communication, nutrition, and agriculture.

The report is structured to be of maximum assistance in the decision-making process. After a brief overview of our objectives, the report begins with the core recommendations for the implementation of a potential program in this area, with some emphasis on the innovative elements. The proposal includes a brief section providing some background information about our task and work, then focuses on three major components: the proposed intervention itself, a novel feedback/feedforward system to be integrated into the intervention, and a call for independent evaluation of the intervention. The remainder of the document is organized as a series of appendices. They provide the foundation to these recommendations, elaborating some of the information we obtained through the background research and interviews. The appendices include: a discussion of the nutrition situation in Ethiopia and the assumptions we made about nutrition in constructing the proposed program; a discussion of the current context and opportunities for realizing a communication intervention, and some thoughts about the institutional and regional context and their implications for shaping the program. The final section of the report presents extended case studies of work by seven organizations (6 currently working in Ethiopia) whose activities are particularly relevant to thinking about how to move forward in the area of communication for nutrition in Ethiopia.