PROJECT SUMMARY
Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest level of food and nutrition insecurity in the world. Despite many interventions, access to accurate and reliable information about the nutrition and health of individuals is severely lacking. This problem is intensified due to time-consuming and expensive primary data collection methods, which are especially challenging in remote locations. With strong national and international investments to reduce all forms of malnutrition, it is essential to find reliable field-friendly ways to collect information that can be readily available for making decisions on nutrition interventions.
This project, implemented in collaboration with the South Africa-based Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network, will address the data gap by developing an information and communications technology-based platform for collecting real-time nutrition data. It builds on the growing recognition that digital platforms can support transformational advances in agriculture, nutrition, and other sustainable development objectives by combining the accuracy and frequency of recording events in near-real time at a low cost.
Researchers will develop a front-end mobile application designed to be user-friendly and operable, even by largely illiterate individuals, along with a back-end web system that serves as a database and dashboard for data analysis. Innovative methods will be tested whereby households can provide their own data directly using icons, photos, interactive voice response, and games. Gender dynamics will be considered throughout the project, and the capacity of women to access and use the data collection tools will be enhanced.
The mobile application will initially be tested in Kenyan communities and expanded to two other African countries. Results will be closely monitored and validated by comparing collected data with traditional methods and through engagement with other stakeholders in the nutrition sector. It will also be made accessible to interested stakeholders involved in national and international programming.
PROJECT OBJECTIVES
- The primary objective of this initial pilot stage is to determine which indicators households are willing to collect accurately and usefully. To this end, the project will also fund parallel longitudinal data collected by trained health care workers. This parallel data will provide a benchmark with which to assess the quality and cost of household-collected data.
- The second objective of this pilot is to determine if the greater frequency of data produced by households is of value. Such a determination will be made by examining the differences in household welfare dynamics as represented by more conventional frequencies and as represented by higher frequencies.
- The third research objective is to continue improving the tool. This includes a wide breadth of topics, including improving the user experience, experimenting with alternative indicators, improving how and which data are provided back to the user, and experimenting with image classification algorithms to further reduce the burden of survey completion.
Actions delivered to date:
A smartphone-based application to collect nutrition and health data by child caregivers and provide feedback to households
Pilot data collection from caregivers and community health volunteers in Samburu County, Kenya.
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This work was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada
