Student Blogger for Global Nutrition Council at ASN’s Scientific Sessions and Annual Meeting at EB 2016

By: Sheela Sinharoy, MPH

Many factors can influence the success of a project, from the individual to the institutional level. Presenters at the minisymposium on Global Nutrition: Nutrition-Sensitive Programs shared results from studies at a variety of levels.

At the individual and household level, gender roles within the household can influence individuals’ ability and willingness to carry out different activities. Marion Min-Barron presented results from qualitative research in Ethiopia, in which men and women were asked about gender roles for nutrition activities. In general, men and women felt that the activities were the responsibility of both the male and the female. However, later in the minisymposium, Gordon Zello shared results from a different study in Ethiopia, where researchers found that women’s work burden (for example, being responsible for fetching water) was a significant factor associated with household food insecurity and hunger. This suggested even if men and women feel that they are equally responsible for nutrition, disproportionate constraints on women’s time could be affecting nutrition in the household.

Women’s self-efficacy in complementary feeding was the focus of a study in Zambia. Djeinam Toure explained that in this study, a home gardening intervention had a positive association with women’s self-efficacy in complementary feeding, and that this relationship was mediated by social support from husbands and also by household food insecurity. In other words, the intervention was positively associated with social support from husbands, which was in turn positively associated with women’s self-efficacy.

Also focusing on household food production, Afua Atuobi-Yeboah and Lilia Bilznashka presented results from Ghana and Burkina Faso, respectively. The study in Ghana found that an intervention to improve egg production at the household level, coupled with nutrition education, significantly improved egg consumption among children. The study in Burkina Faso was a follow-on to an impact evaluation that had previously found positive impacts on women’s dietary diversity and underweight as well as child wasting and anemia. Two years later, significant differences remained between intervention and control groups in women’s underweight and child wasting but not in women’s dietary diversity or child anemia, suggesting that for the latter two indicators, the control group may have improved to the level of the intervention group.

Moving to the institutional level, speakers presented findings from both qualitative and quantitative research. Tuan Nguyen presented results from an impact evaluation of a national mass media campaign in Vietnam, which was found to be positively associated with exclusive breastfeeding. Andrea Warren shared findings from a qualitative study in Ethiopia that found inadequate coordination structures for nutrition-sensitive interventions at the national level, among other challenges. Gita Singh presented findings from a project to collect and analyze individual-level national or subnational data to determine dietary intakes of key nutritional factors across 188 countries from 1980-2015. This effort has thus far assembled 1,226 total survey-years of data on dietary intakes of a variety of foods and nutrients.

The findings of the minisymposium made clear that a variety of approaches, through a variety of sectors, are important for improving nutrition globally.