The NutrInvest Tool is a comprehensive assessment framework designed to help investment officers and fund managers evaluate opportunities through a nutrition-focused lens, ensuring both meaningful impact and financial sustainability.
The NutrInvest Tool is an evidence-based framework that helps investors assess the nutrition impact of their investments. Leveraging the screening tool developed by GAIN for its Nutritious Foods Financing Facility (N3F), Wellspring Development, with funding from USAID and in consultation with partners, developed a tool for screening nutrition investments. This tool is now a user-friendly web app designed to be accessible to as many investors as possible.
This nutrition-lens investment screening assessment utilizes a two-stage screening process – the first stage considers the food product that the company or project falls into (if relevant), and the second stage considers whether the investment aligns with any of the levers of change in the three impact pathways.
The first stage of screening uses a traffic light system of red, yellow, and green food categories.
If an investment is focused on producing, processing, distributing, or marketing foods or a majority of foods in the green category, it passes to stage 2 screening.
If an investment is focused on producing, processing, distributing, or marketing foods in the red or yellow category, it is not considered a nutrition investment.
Investments that are not associated with a specific food (e.g., enabling infrastructure or technology and indirect investment) will go automatically to stage 2 screening.
Investments then need to score against at least one of the screening criteria in Stage 2 to qualify as a nutrition investment, although some (e.g., a vertically integrated agribusiness) may score against more than one.
Finally, investments are assessed based on whether they primarily target nutrition impact in low and middle-income countries.
If an investment primarily benefits consumers in domestic and regional markets across ODA countries, it is considered a nutrition investment.
This tool is part of the broader Nourishing Food Pathways program, which aims to accelerate progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) through inclusive and cohesive transformation within food systems across ten priority countries.
Initial project funders