Compare methods

	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Children
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2016	2021
Originator	FAO & FANTA III (Martin-Prevel, Arimond, Ballard, Deitchler, Kennedy and colleagues)	World Health Organization & UNICEF (IYCF indicator working group)
Type	Dichotomous food-group-count indicator for women's diet quality	Dichotomous food-group-count indicator for young-child complementary feeding
Seminal source	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.	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
Aliases	MDD-W, Minimum Dietary Diversity Women, Women's Dietary Diversity Score, MDD-W indicator	MDD-IYCF, Minimum Dietary Diversity (IYCF), Infant and Young Child Minimum Dietary Diversity, MDD 6-23 months
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	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.