Improving Dietary and Health Data for Decision-Making in Agriculture and Nutrition Actions in Africa

Improving dietary and health data for decision-making in agriculture and nutrition actions in Africa

Child malnutrition is one of the most used indicators for tracking progress towards attainment of Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2) and the impacts of development interventions. Unfortunately, the current methods for collecting child nutrition indicators require considerable training, are slow and are expensive to collect data accurately. In this project, we developed and tested a mobile smartphone-based platform called Mbiotisho which means our health in Samburu, one of the local languages in Kenya), by which households can easily collect, submit, and access information on their and their children’s nutritional status in near-real time and at extremely low cost. Over the course of four years, we piloted and implemented the application in four locations.

Autor(es) : Sibanda, Simbarashe, Jensen, Nathaniel

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Lenguaje: Inglés

Improving dietary and health data for decision-making in agriculture and nutrition actions in Africa : policy brief

Traditional methods used to collect health and nutrition data depend on enumerators or use of health facilities. These approaches suffer from accessibility bias, are costly, and the infrequent data collection intervals under heterogeneous and fast-moving conditions may not accurately track changes in nutritional status and household coping mechanisms that occur over short periods of time. These can have serious implications on how practitioners and policy makers judge the impacts of shocks and of interventions aimed at improving household welfare. Furthermore, such data are often of little direct use to households themselves as they do not receive feedback on their own status or trajectories. This data inadequacy will continue to negatively impact the efforts of governments and development practitioners to effectively programme and monitor the performance of nutrition and health interventions, and ultimately, achievement of national and global nutrition and health targets.

Autor(es) : Kiage, Beatrice, Sibanda, Simbarashe, Jensen, Nathan, Lapariyo, Watson, Alulu, Vincent

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Lenguaje: Inglés

Assessing Mbiotisho : a smartphone application used to collect high‐frequency health and nutrition data from difficult‐to‐reach populations

There is an urgent need for improved and timely health and nutrition data. We developed and tested a smartphone application that caregivers from a pastoral population used to measure, record and submit high‐frequency and longitudinal health and nutrition information on themselves and their children. The data were assessed by comparing caregiver‐submitted measurements of mid–upper arm circumference (MUAC) to several benchmark data sets, including data collected by community health volunteers from the participating caregivers during the project period and data generated by interpreting photographs of MUAC measurements submitted by all participants. We found that the caregivers participated frequently and consistently over the 12‐month period of the project; most of them made several measurements and submissions in at least 48 of the 52 weeks of the project. The evaluation of data quality was sensitive to which data set was used as the benchmark, but the results indicate that the errors in the caregivers' submissions were similar to that of enumerators in other studies. We then compare the costs of this alternative approach to data collection through more conventional methods, concluding that conventional methods can be more cost‐effective for large socioeconomic surveys that value the breadth of the survey over the frequency of data, while the alternative we tested is favoured for those with objectives that are better met by high‐frequency observations of a smaller number of well‐defined outcomes.

Autor(es) : Jensen, Nathaniel, Lepariyo, Watson, Alulu, Vincent, Sibanda, Simbarashe, Kiage, Beatrice N.

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Lenguaje: Inglés

Improving dietary and health data for decision making in agriculture and nutrition actions in Africa

The report covers activities and conference sessions regarding questions and strategies for implementation of the project which aims to develop and build capacity of an information and communications technology-based (ICT-based) platform. This will collect low-cost, high-frequency, high-resolution dietary and health data, and will combine accuracy and frequency through recording events in near-real time. The workshop focused on the following issues: i) What data should the tool/platform collect? ii) Tool-functionality, and methods for testing it, along with comparison to traditional data collection methods iii) Potential uses and scalability of the tool.

Autor(es) : Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

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Lenguaje: Inglés

Improving dietary and health data for decision-making in agriculture and nutrition actions in Africa

The policy brief describes the project which works to develop and build capacity around an ICT based platform that will collect health data directly from households, as well as presenting households with relevant dietary and nutritional information. The aim of the initial pilot stage is to develop cost-effective and scalable technology that will improve collection of health information. The second aim is to strengthen country, regional and household capacity to use the tools and the data, towards creating better health, nutrition and agricultural policy and policy decisions.

Autor(es) : Sibanda, Simba, Jensen, Nathan

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Lenguaje: Inglés