The Operations Research and Impact Evaluation (ORIE) project, led by Oxford Policy Management, has contributed for the past five years to inform nutrition research and the policy debates in Nigeria and beyond.

ORIE provided operations research, impact evaluations, costing and cost effectiveness studies for the ambitious £52 million, six-year, Department for International Development (DFID)-funded Working to Improve Nutrition in Northern Nigeria (WINNN) programme, which supports the government to improve maternal, newborn and child nutrition in five northern states. ORIE worked closely with key federal and state government stakeholders to ensure that findings reached them and informed their policies.

This review of literature (both global and Nigerian) has been prepared to inform the ORIE project, to assess gaps in knowledge, support WINNN programme design and implementation about what is needed, what has been done already in Northern Nigeria and what has worked in other contexts, and to inform DFID on possible pilots to tackle underlying determinants of child hood stunting.