There are limitations to achieving a direct and lasting impact on nutrition through food security interventions alone. While food security interventions improve access to food at the household level, direct nutrition interventions address aspects of intra-household food allocation, caring behaviour and food utilization by the body. Institutionalising the community action planning approach. Linked to the issue of technical capacity of community support staff to implement and sustain participatory approaches in their daily work, is the observation that many community support staff are often unmotivated and hampered in their work by lack of operational resources and opportunities. While governments and local institutions may institutionalise participatory approaches, rendering these approaches operational requires qualified staff and resources.
Many local institutions lack the required resource base.
Well-qualified individuals frequently seek better opportunities outside or at the margins of the public sector and are not easily available unless competitive incentives are provided. Others within the public sector often lack the resources and means for continued implementation of what was learned during the project and await opportunities provided by other projects. However, while projects are temporary features, the need and demand for services created through participatory projects remain and need to be addressed if the momentum is to be maintained. Several lessons can be learned in this respect. The first lesson is that, when designing participatory and other projects, it is essential to objectively evaluate the capacity of the public service resource base to provide the required community support services during and following the termination of the project.