Minimum dietary diversity for women

The minimum dietary diversity for women (MDD-W) indicator is a food group diversity indicator that reflects micronutrient adequacy. This publication provides guidance on collection, analysis and measurement of data, including list-based and open recall methods.

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Women of reproductive age (WRA) are often nutritionally vulnerable because of the physiological demands of pregnancy and lactation. Requirements for most nutrients are higher for pregnant and lactating women than for adult men. The Minimum Dietary Diversity for WRA (MDD-W) indicator is a food-based diversity indicator that has been shown to reflect one key dimension of diet quality: micronutrient adequacy summarised across 11 micronutrients (Martin-Prâvel et al., 2015).Since the launch of the MDD-W indicator in 2015, new global developments and research conducted in three countries to further determine best practices in the data collection resulted in new information and guidelines. This research was supported by capacity-development activities on the assessment of individual food consumption.This publication is an update to the 2016 FAO/FHI 360 joint publication MDD-W: A Guide to Measurement. It includes guidance on the most accurate and valid methodologies on collecting, analysing, interpreting, and presenting data on women's dietary diversity, for use in research, impact assessment and large-scale, health and nutrition surveys such as the Demographic Health Survey (DHS), to generate nationally representative data, that are comparable over time and across countries.In addition to supporting the regular collection of high-quality dietary data following standardized methodologies, the publication also aims to promote dialogues on and appropriate application of the data towards informing policy and programming decisions and monitoring and evaluation of nutrition outcomes and progress at global, regional, and country levels