In Kenya there is considerable variation in coverage across various nutrition interventions within and between counties. This demonstrates the persistent and significant gaps between national targets and actual achievements. Furthermore, the poor quality and coverage of the nutrition data itself hinders efforts to assess progress and establish accountability for nutrition programs. Together these observations highlight the profound challenge of translating the current evidence base for nutrition interventions, and the collective will to translate it, into high quality and sustainable implementation and impact at-scale. It is not enough to know that a nutrition intervention is efficacious; it is also necessary to identify and address barriers and enablers of effectiveness under large-scale, real-world conditions.

3UJ applies implementation science as an opportunity for multiple stakeholders to engage in collaborative and sustainable efforts to advance our understanding of how nutrition interventions can work in context-specific settings within our counties or “mashinani”. We facilitate nutrition communities at county and national levels to develop a shared understanding of the scope and breadth of decisions and processes that make up and affect ‘implementation’; the diverse forms of ‘implementation research’ (IR) that can inform and strengthen implementation; and the even broader and more immediate ways in which ‘implementation science’ can inform and strengthen implementation of nutrition programs in our counties.