Project CENA

Essential Nutrition Actions (ENA) are a set of high-impact, nutrition-specific interventions designed to improve maternal and child nutrition, including exclusive breastfeeding, appropriate complementary feeding, nutritional care of sick children, and adequate intake of key micronutrients such as vitamin A, iron, and iodine. Their effectiveness depends heavily on achieving high coverage, as meaningful impact occurs only when interventions reach nearly all those in need; therefore, measuring coverage is essential to assessing success. However, significant gaps remain in the availability and quality of coverage data, with many countries lacking comprehensive, comparable information on key nutrition interventions. Current assessments also fail to adequately address variations in local versus national coverage, realistic timelines for reaching standards, and the need to progressively raise performance benchmarks to ensure continuous improvement.