Endline Evaluation Brief: Enhancing Leadership, Commitment and Accountability to Improve Nutrition Outcomes Project (ECSC-SUN) (2019–2025)

To address Ethiopia’s persistent challenge of translating national nutrition policy commitments into coordinated action, the Ethiopian Civil Society Coalition for Scaling Up Nutrition (ECSC-SUN)—hosted by Save the Children International and funded by Irish Aid—implemented an integrated project from 2019 to 2025 across the Afar, Somali, and Tigray regions. A mixed-methods endline evaluation revealed that the initiative significantly strengthened national and regional nutrition governance, civil society participation, and multisectoral coordination while expanding the coalition to over 80 member organizations.

At the community level, combining policy advocacy with women’s economic empowerment (WEE) and adolescent nutrition programming yielded substantial results: 97.2% of WEE participants reported increased income, 98.3% gained greater household decision-making power, and moderate-to-severe household food insecurity dropped dramatically from 62.2% at baseline to 23.5% at endline. Overall, the project demonstrated that linking governance architecture with practical, community-level interventions effectively drives nutrition outcomes and local resilience, though long-term sustainability will require ongoing institutional ownership, diversified funding, climate-resilient livelihoods, and solutions for localized structural constraints such as water scarcity and limited capital.