Stakeholders urged to support digital communication to address malnutrition challenges

Professor Robert Darko Osei, the Research Project Lead at the Institute of Statistical, Social, and Economic Research (ISSER), has urged stakeholders to support digital communication technologies to address malnutrition in rural areas.

He said there was huge potential for using digital communication to effect changes in nutrition behavior among poor households.

Professor Osei made this statement during a stakeholder engagement workshop on the findings of a three-year research project in four Northern Regions titled "Using Digital Communication to Reinforce Nutrition and Household Resilience in Northern Ghana."

The workshop educated attendees on the findings of the research, which aimed to assess whether digital communication could be deployed for rural education on nutrition and health and its impact on household behaviors.

This research project, led by ISSER at the University of Ghana, Legon, is part of a USAID-funded collaborative research grant program between the Feed the Future Innovation Laboratory for Markets, Risks, and Resilience under USAID and the International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED).

It sought to understand how using Interactive Voice Response (IVR) messages as a mode of communicating nutrition and WASH educational content could change behaviors in rural households for positive nutrition and health outcomes.

"After conducting research fieldwork over three years across four northern regions within 232 rural communities, the research project has found policy-relevant results," Professor Osei added.

He indicated that malnutrition continued to be a public health challenge, especially in the northern sector, which needed the attention of all stakeholders to address the challenge.

According to Professor Osei, nutrition, health, and sanitation are important components of a livelihoods approach to tackle inequality, poverty, and deprivation.

He appealed to stakeholders to address nutrition in local languages to improve health-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices in rural areas.

Dr. Charles Yaw Okyere, who is part of the project team, said the research found that at baseline, stunting is about 17.5 percent, wasting is six percent, and underweight is about 12.3 percent, according to the 2022 Demographic and Health Survey.

According to him, malnutrition affected child educational outcomes and was more pronounced in the northern regions of Ghana.

He stated that in the research, 30 percent of the households studied had a poor food consumption score.

Dr. Fidela Dake, a team member of the research project, said so far the project has positively impacted nutrition outcomes and self-reported health after six months of sending messages to beneficiary households.

She added that these messages, communicated through the IVR platform, had changed nutrition and WASH perceptions among households, and now more people take handwashing and boiling water before drinking as key health tools.