Investigating Caregivers Young Child Feeding Knowledge And Practices Time Allocated To Child Care And Pathways For Improving Childrens Diets Through Mass Media In Rural Ghana

"Nutrition-sensitive agricultural (NSA) interventions use integrated approaches to improve rural nutrition. The Nutrition Links (NL) project was a multi-faceted nutrition-sensitive intervention in the Upper Manya Krobo District (UMKD) of Ghana. The NL project included an agriculture-education trial targeted at women with an infant 12 months and below, and a district-wide nutrition education intervention delivered through radio. This doctoral research included three studies within the context of the NL project. The dissertation objectives were to: (i) understand maternal time allocation to child care in the UMKD (ii) explore current caregiver’s infant and young child feeding knowledge and practices, and (iii) test the effect of a behaviour change campaign to improve infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices. The first study involved mother-child pairs in the NL agriculture-education trial. The intervention (NL-I) mothers received point-of-lay chickens, training on agriculture and home gardening, and nutrition education; the control (NL-C) mothers received standard government services. A subsample of mothers (74 NL-I and 69 NL-C) were observed at home by two field staff; one observed the mother and the other the child for 1 minute, every 5 minutes, for a total of 6 hours. The results showed that caregiving by the mother did not differ by treatment group (OR=1.07, 95% CI [0.89,1.28]). There was however a higher odds of any allocare (OR= 1.36, 95%CI [1.04, 1.79]) and, specifically, allocare by siblings who were less than 11 years old (25% vs 15%; p