Effectiveness of nutrition education in enhancing nutrition quality of complementary foods for children, 6 - 23 months in Mumias and Vihiga sub-counties

Abstract

The first two years of a child's life are considered the critical as inadequate nutrition results in sub-optimal growth and development, and increased risk of morbidity. One third of children in Kenya are stunted, reflective of poor nutrition during this critical period. A poor complementary feeding regime is one of the causes, as a study done in Western Kenya has documented. Evidence shows nutrition education is important in the alleviation of regressive child growth and development. The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of nutrition education in enhancing dietary diversity and quality of complementary foods. The target population is children, 6 - 23 months and their caregivers in Vihiga and Mumias sub-counties. These two areas have been selected because of rich agro biodiversity and high stunting rates (34.2%). They are based in different agro ecological zones, namely Humid Lower Midland Zone 1 and Humid Upper Midland Zone 1, respectively. The research design for the study will be a cluster randomized controlled study. Three periodic surveys; baseline, second and end-term will be conducted to determine important characteristics of the population such as socio-demography, anthropometric assessment and dietary assessment. Individual interviews and focus group discussions with both women and men groups will be carried out during the second survey. A sample of 15 villages will be drawn from each area. In each village, 10 mother-child pairs will be randomly selected to make a total of 150 in each sub-county. There will be two study groups: intervention and control. The nutrition education group will undergo four training and two followup sessions over a six month period. The control group will not be exposed to any training. After the baseline survey, the clusters will then be pair matched on the basis of dietary diversity, socioeconomic status and mothers' level of education. The cluster pairs will then be randomly assigned to either the intervention or control groups. Comparisons between the respective groups will be made at the end of study. Data will be analyzed using the latest version of SPSS version 22.0; descriptive statistics will be used to describe the characteristics of the population. Multivariate analysis and exploratory factor analysis will be used to test the difference between the treatment and control groups variables and a significance of will be tested at p<0.05. Dietary intake will be analyzed using NUTRI-SURVEY software and nutrition status using ENA for SMART, 2011. The study is important as it will highlight the relevance of nutrition education in improving complementary feeding practices