Nutrition sensitive Agriculture, Is it possible in Morogoro Rural District? Key nutrition stakeholders ways practiced and awareness of its importance in Mvuha and Mkuyuni wards.

According to FAO (2017), nutrition-sensitive agriculture is an approach that seeks to ensure the production of a variety of affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate and safe foods in adequate quantity and quality to meet the dietary requirements of populations in a sustainable manner. This study focused on analyzing ways in which the concept is implemented and assessing its awareness among the key nutrition stakeholders. These included government officials from village, ward and district levels, NGOs, agriculture inputs suppliers, food vendors and grain millers. Cross - sectional study design was employed and information from respondents were collected by using semi-structured questionnaires, key informant interviews and transect walk. Data analysis was conducted by using SPSS version 20. It was found that home gardening (85.3%) and livestock keeping (57.4%) were the most practiced ways of nutrition-sensitive agriculture. Other ways, including use of biofortified crops, fish farming, use of watering techniques in production of fruits and vegetables, use of soil fertility conserving techniques and using improved food crop varieties were hardly practiced. Above 90% of household heads knew the importance of agriculture to nutrition being a source of food for household consumption, a source of income and employment, makes easy to access nutrient dense foods in the household and ensuring food security. The study also observed high awareness about the concept even though, the actual implementation was low. It was concluded that, low economic status among the rural poor farmers is the major reasons that have led to the observed low practices of other studied ways of agriculture that are nutrition sensitive. It is recommended that, all key stakeholders should work together to subsidize seeds and other agro-inputs which are needed by the farmers to practice these ways.