The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) has made significant economic progress since the turn of the century but nevertheless 33% of children under 5 (CU5) were stunted in 2017 (Lao Social Indicator Survey II – LSIS II). In Khammouane Province CU5 stunting incidence was about 30% and wasting 10% and the Province contains many remote ethnic communities where rates are expected to be considerably above the provincial average. In 2015 the Government of Lao PDR, strongly supported by the European Union (EU), approved a National Nutrition Strategy 2016-25 (NNS) and Plan of Action 2016-2020 (NNSPA). The EU developed a Partnership for Improved Nutrition (PIN) as a contribution to NNSPA implementation, and the project under evaluation – Food Security and Nutrition in Lao PDR (hereafter referred to as the FSN Project, or simply the Project) – was awarded through a Call for Proposals (CFP) under PIN Pillar 3. Information about the relationship of the Project to other actions funded under the three pillars of the PIN are discussed in Section 2.1 (Finding 3 - Finding 5). Unlike the other PIN projects that were developed from scratch, the FNS Project evolved from a previously planned flood response project that was to have been funded under the EU’s Food Security Thematic Programme (FSTP), and utilised that allocated funding. The evolution in project formulation and design, which was discussed in detail in Section 1.2 of the Inception Report (reproduced hereunder in Annex 13), resulted in a CFP that included some of the FSTP objectives pertaining to food security and resilience, which are still to be found in the Project’s logframe. A change to be noted is that whereas the wording of two of the Expected Results (ERs) remained unchanged in the iterations between identification and CFP, they were changed in the proposal and therefore in the subsequent grant award. The change removed the integration between the ERs and enabled the possibility to undertake them independently. The FSN Project grant contract was awarded to a consortium of three co-applicants, the International Non Government Organisations (INGOs) Health Poverty Action (HPA) and Fundacion Pueblo Para Pueblo (FPP) and the Khammouane Provincial Health Office (PHO) (hereafter referred to as the consortium) in August 2017 with an implementation period of 39 months. It took until January 2019 for a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to be signed by the Director General of the Department of Hygiene and Health Promotion, Head of Secretariat Office of National Nutrition Committee, and in December 2020 a no-cost extension until August 2021 was granted. Figure 1 shows the location of Khammouane Province and the Project’s six target districts in Lao PDR.