Host Organization: Catholic Relief Services
First Year Placement
Maiduguri, Nigeria
For her first-year placement, Sara worked with Catholic Relief Services’ (CRS’s) nutrition and markets programs in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state in northeastern Nigeria. For the nutrition program, Sara conducted a trend analysis to help evaluate the community-based supplementary feeding program, Tom Brown, and provide recommendations to improve its implementation. Sara also led the creation of a comprehensive implementation guide for Tom Brown to increase its adoption by peer agencies and other CRS country programs. Further, Sara worked with the markets team to provide guidance on market monitoring efforts, based on best practices and existing tools.
Second Year Placement
Baltimore, Maryland & Washington, D.C.
For her second-year placement in Washington, D.C., Sara will be leading research that examines how policies, systems, and structures can enable or hinder nutrition outcomes, specifically looking at the U.S. government’s programmatic approaches as well as nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive programming implemented throughout the global nutrition sector. These research findings intend to help CRS better design nutrition programs for scale up and further commit to localization of nutrition programming. Sara will also lead analyses related to food insecurity “hot spots” in the context of the coronavirus pandemic to inform response programming and donor advocacy.