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	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Children	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2021	2016
Originator	World Health Organization & UNICEF (IYCF indicator working group)	FAO & FANTA III (Martin-Prevel, Arimond, Ballard, Deitchler, Kennedy and colleagues)
Type	Dichotomous food-group-count indicator for young-child complementary feeding	Dichotomous food-group-count indicator for women's diet quality
Seminal source	World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) (2021). Indicators for Assessing Infant and Young Child Feeding Practices: Definitions and Measurement Methods. WHO, Geneva. ISBN: 9789240018389	FAO and FHI 360 (2016). Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women: A Guide to Measurement. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and USAID's Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III Project (FANTA), Rome.
Aliases	MDD-IYCF, Minimum Dietary Diversity (IYCF), Infant and Young Child Minimum Dietary Diversity, MDD 6-23 months	MDD-W, Minimum Dietary Diversity Women, Women's Dietary Diversity Score, MDD-W indicator
Related	4	4
Summary	Minimum Dietary Diversity (MDD) for children is the WHO/UNICEF infant and young child feeding (IYCF) indicator measuring whether a child aged 6 to 23 months consumed foods and beverages from at least five of eight defined food groups in the previous day, used as a population proxy for the quality of complementary feeding. Defined in the WHO's 2008 IYCF indicator guidance and substantially revised in the 2021 WHO/UNICEF update, the indicator targets the window in which breast milk alone no longer meets a child's needs and complementary foods must supply increasing nutrients. The 2021 revision raised the food-group count from seven to eight by adding breast milk as its own group, correcting a bias that had penalized breastfed children, and the share of children reaching the minimum is now a core global feeding-practice statistic.	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) is a validated, dichotomous indicator of whether a woman of reproductive age consumed foods from at least five of ten defined food groups in the previous 24 hours, used as a population proxy for the micronutrient adequacy of women's diets. It was finalized in the 2016 FAO and FANTA guide A Guide to Measurement, following the consensus process documented by Martin-Prevel and colleagues that selected the ten-group list and the five-group cut-off from competing candidate indicators. Unlike the broader Individual Dietary Diversity Score, MDD-W is purpose-built for women aged 15 to 49 and yields a clean yes/no classification, making the share of women reaching the minimum a transparent, globally comparable diet-quality statistic for surveys and program monitoring.