Improving Nutritional Status through Behavioral Change : Lessons from Madagascar
This paper provides evidence of the effects of a large-scale intervention that focuses on the quality of nutritional and child care inputs during the early stages of life. The empirical strategy uses a combination of double-difference and weighting...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2007/12/8877154/improving-nutritional-status-through-behavioral-change-lessons-madagascar http://hdl.handle.net/10986/7607 |
| Summary: | This paper provides evidence of the
effects of a large-scale intervention that focuses on the
quality of nutritional and child care inputs during the
early stages of life. The empirical strategy uses a
combination of double-difference and weighting estimators in
a longitudinal survey to address the purposive placement of
participating communities and estimate the effect of the
availability of the program at the community level on
nutritional outcomes. The authors find that the program
helped 0-5 year old children in the participating
communities to bridge the gap in weight for age z-scores and
the incidence of underweight. The program also had
significant effects in protecting long-term nutritional
outcomes (height for age z-scores and incidence of stunting)
against an underlying negative trend in the absence of the
program. Importantly, the effect of the program exhibits
substantial heterogeneity: gains in nutritional outcomes are
larger for more educated mothers and for villages with
better infrastructure. The program enables the analysis to
isolate responsiveness to information provision and
disentangle the effect of knowledge in the education effect
on nutritional outcomes. The results are suggestive of
important complementarities among child care, maternal
education, and community infrastructure. |
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