Community Participation in Nutrition Interventions

This editorial to the collection examines the construct of participation, how it is defined, measured, and integrated into all stages of nutrition research projects and programs and how it influences intervention outcomes.

The authors of this paper offer a simple framework to stimulate thought and commitment to research on participation in community-based nutrition interventions and concludes that nutrition across various sectors and contexts is key to accomplishing SDG goal 2.

This paper's findings highlight various facilitators and barriers that need to be given special attention during the design and implementation phases of PDH (Positive Deviance/Hearth) and PDH-IVC (Positive Deviance/Hearth-Interactive Voice Calling program). The mental health, time, and resource constraints of elderly caregivers should also be addressed for a context like Cambodia when implementing child-focused health and nutrition programs.

Understanding the complexity in which Farmer-Based Organizations' (FBO) participation, empowerment, nutritional status, and food security are linked is critical in designing interventions that promote gender equality and improved nutrition.

The findings in this paper suggest that both supply- and demand-side solutions are needed to improve HMG (health mothers’ group) performance and uptake in Nepal. These solutions need to include improving FCHV (female community health volunteer) skills and motivating them to provide high-quality HMG services, as well as encouraging family members to support women so that they have time to participate in the HMGs.

Addressing poverty as a core aim of the intervention approach galvanized strong multisectoral buy-in across these projects, as poverty is a common challenge among the populations targeted by all rural institutions. Regular information sharing through workshops and other meetings provided opportunities for cross-sector interactions which resulted in mutual learning and an appreciation for multisectoral engagement.

This paper concludes that effective local implementation of MSN (Multisectoral Nutrition) policy requires country-level commitment together with local leadership and capacity building, and community engagement to ensure efforts fit program contexts.

This study demonstrates the importance of community-based approaches to understand how much MIYCN (Maternal, Infant, and Young Child Nutrition) training and counseling are intertwined, indicating the need for interventions to address both using a multipronged approach that addresses barriers across all levels of the socioecological model, taking the local context into account.

This paper concludes that the LC (Learning Circle) approach is an inclusive and respectful way of engaging community and promoting local and traditional foods, knowledge, and practices among Indigenous youth in rural and remote locations.

This study compares GM (Growth Monitoring) manuals from Tanzania, India and The Netherlands with each other, and with the materials for the WHO’s training course on child growth assessment.

The authors of this paper found limited impacts of a 3 year nutrition BCC (Behavior Change Communication) intervention through agriculture-focused SHGs (Self-Help Groups) on nutrition outcomes and on intermediate pathway indicators expected to lead to those outcomes. Despite these limited impacts, much can be learned from the studied effort to improve women’s nutrition through SHGs.

This study demonstrates that a multipronged SBCC (social and Behavior Change Communication) intervention can modify mothers’ complementary feeding practices, improve fathers’ and mothers’ knowledge of complementary feeding, and increase fathers’ support for complementary feeding, despite low levels of participant-reported exposure to some intervention components.

The objective of this study was to determine the association between mothers’ level of participation in the NL (Nutrition Links) project and their children’s dietary and anthropometric outcomes.

The results from this study emphasize the role of targeted and integrated nutrition education approaches in improving OFSP (Orange-Fleshed Sweetpotato) consumption behavior; therefore, it is imperative to focus on increasing the rate of consumption of OFSP over time to ensure sustainable utilization of essential micronutrients.

This study explores the pathways from a nutrition-sensitive agriculture intervention to improved diets of women and young children. It also tests theoretical agriculture-to-nutrition pathways by comparing the authors' documented pathways with the pathways from the widely used TANDI (Tackling the Agriculture–Nutrition Disconnect in India) framework.

This article contributes to the debate around the use of participatory approaches by giving a tool (cameras) to the most marginalized to revitalize traditional foods (mostly nonmarket and even noncultivated) as a response to food insecurity and possibly malnutrition.

This study presents evidence that PV (Participatory Video) nutrition education promotes a transformative change and is the first study to evaluate: 1) the influence of a PV nutrition education intervention on adolescent participants’ critical nutrition literacy and behavior, and 2) the perceived impact of the intervention on participants and local stakeholders. It is also the first study of a PV nutrition intervention with adolescent creators.

This study assesed how participation in an NSA (Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture) intervention affected mothers' time allocation to child care. The observation of women-child pairs participating in the intervention and control arms of the NL (Nutrition Links) project did not reveal any differentials in the mothers’ time for care. In summary, this study found that participating in an NSA intervention was not associated with mothers' time for child care or any care received by the child. However, the odds of care provided by another person was associated with being part of the NL-I (Nutrition Links Intervention) group.

This study demonstrates that systems science provides positive implementation approaches to design and translates nutrition behaviors and knowledge into practice.