Effects of integrated Nutrition Education approaches on Production and Consumption of Orange-fleshed Sweetpotatoes in Homa Bay County, Kenya
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Date
2020Author
Ojwang, Sylvester, O
Type
ThesisLanguage
enMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Malnutrition is still a big menace in sub-Saharan Africa as approximately 48 percent of children
below five years and 20 percent of pregnant-age women suffer from the effects of Vitamin A
deficiency (VAD); night blindness, increased child morbidity and mortality. Biofortified staples
have been promoted widely in the region as a sustainable way of addressing the undernutrition
problem. Recent studies have shown that these foods can contribute to the fight against
malnutrition, and are accepted by young children. However, the existing initiatives used in
promoting the vitamin A biofortified orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) have borne fruits,
whose impacts have seldom been felt beyond the borders of the direct beneficiaries and the
active periods of the projects. Nevertheless, the potential role of simultaneous nutrition education
dissemination to preschool children and their caregivers on the continued production and
consumption of fresh biofortified food remain much less understood. Thus, the main objective of
this study was to assess the effects of disseminating nutrition education to preschool children and
their caregivers on the production and consumption of OFSP.
The objectives of the study were to assess the effects of integrated nutrition education
approaches on; i) the caregivers‟ knowledge, attitude and practices (KAP) around OFSP; ii) the
caregivers‟ likelihood to replant OFSP after phase-out of the free vines dissemination projects;
and iii) the consumption of OFSP among preschool children. The study was guided by the
random utility theory and employed a randomized controlled trial approach. Participants were
selected through a multistage sampling technique. The first stage gave a purposive sample of 15
villages that had no prior interaction with OFSP promotion projects in the Ndhiwa and Rangwe
Sub-counties of Homa Bay County. The second stage involved using proportionate to size
sampling and simple random sampling techniques to choose 431 preschooler-caregiver pairs who
participated in preliminary activities of the study - cooking demonstrations and dissemination of
free vines. The 15 villages were randomized into four groups (one control and three treatment
groups) and all participants in the groups were assigned the respective interventions. The
treatments involved the issuance of nutrition education; i) to preschool children alone via OFSPbranded
exercise books, class posters, and poems; ii) to caregivers alone by sending bulk
nutrition education messages to their phones; and iii) to both the preschooler and the caregiver
simultaneously using the same methods in other treatment arms. Baseline and follow-up survey
data were collected using structured questionnaires. Also, a dietary diversity register was used to
collect data on the preschoolers‟ consumption of OFSP during school days. The effects of the
treatments were elicited by estimation of the generalized linear regression model (GLM), special
regressor method (SRM), and the zero-inflated Poisson (ZIP) regression model in line with the
three hypotheses, respectively.
The results show that only the multiple-channel oriented nutrition education gave significant
improvements in all the dimensions of the caregivers‟ knowledge of OFSP. It also improved the
likelihood of the caregivers to retain the OFSP on their farms significantly while the singlechannel
approaches failed to provide any significant improvements. Further, both the single and
multiple-channel oriented nutrition education approaches increased the number of days on which
the preschool children were fed on the OFSP roots. Overall, the magnitude of the effect of OFSP
nutrition education interventions was significantly improved by delivering the nutrition
education through multiple channels and ensuring higher rates of reception of the assigned
interventions by the target group. Accordingly, the study concludes that the integration of
complementary nutrition education interventions, delivered through the Early Childhood
Development (ECD) platforms, can enhance the supply of and demand for nutritious crops such
as OFSP in the menus of malnutrition high risk groups to improve food and nutrition security.
The study recommends that agriculture-nutrition education interventions should consider both
preschoolers‟ learning materials and the caregivers‟ mobile phones as effective platforms for
nudging the caregivers to adopt the biofortified staples sustainably.
Publisher
University of Nairobi
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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