Bangladesh has had difficulty aligning nutrition programming with context-specific underlying causes of malnutrition and scaling up high-quality nutrition services through uncoordinated governance structures at all levels. Maximising the Quality of Scaling Up Nutrition (MQSUN) provided a range of technical assistance to the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Bangladeshi government between 2011 and 2016 to address this challenge.

MQSUN provided strategic technical assistance by first conducting a comprehensive literature review of the underlying causes of malnutrition in Bangladesh. Then, MQSUN supported the Bangladesh National Nutrition Services (NNS) to improve the implementation of the NNS operational plan through targeted capacity development, including intensive human resources national planning and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) guidance to institutionalise a national nutrition surveillance system. In 2013, MQSUN supported DFID in the technical design of the Programme to Accelerate Improved Nutrition for the Extreme Poor in Bangladesh. MQSUN also conducted an independent mixed methods impact evaluation of the same programme—assessing the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of integrating nutrition-specific with nutrition-sensitive (e.g. livelihoods) interventions.