The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), aims to reduce poverty and improve nutrition, food security, and livelihoods in developing countries by supporting the sustainable development of aquaculture and fisheries systems.
The Fish Innovation Lab is one of 21 Feed the Future Innovation Labs leveraging the expertise of U.S. universities and developing country research institutions to tackle some of the world’s greatest challenges in agriculture and food security. These labs harness U.S. and global expertise on a variety of food security topics – from horticulture to food security policy and beyond.
The Fish Innovation Lab focuses on applied reach in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Nigeria, the Pacific Islands, Peru, the Philippines, and Zambia; it has 24 activities, 20 of which are currently active. The Lab’s program areas include improving productivity, mitigating risk, and improving human outcomes. Additionally, the Fish Innovation Lab has four cross-cutting themes, which are incorporated into each funded project and guide the Lab’s work overall. These are mainstreaming gender equity and youth inclusion,? advancing human and institutional capacity development?, strengthening resilience?, and advancing nutrition?. All the while, the Lab’s theory of change (Figure 1) helps guide the activities to meet these important objectives.
One of the Fish Innovation Lab’s key goals is to assess nutrition as both outcome and determinant and support research to identify interventions that optimize human health and livelihoods while sustaining aquatic ecosystems over the long term. Through research in our three areas of inquiry, we delineate and ultimately impact multiple pathways to food security and human nutrition in vulnerable groups living in low-resource households and among smallholder fisher families. It is critical to support pregnant and lactating women, infants and young children, and school-aged children with research that aims at reducing hunger and improving nutrition to decrease childhood stunting and wasting.