Stakeholders urged to support digital communication to address malnutrition challenges

Professor Robert Darko Osei, Research Project Lead of 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 a huge gain and potential in using digital communication to effect changes in nutritional behaviour among poor households.Prof. Osei made the call during a stakeholders' engagement workshop on 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 was to disseminate the findings of the research, which was aimed at assessing whether digital communication could be deployed for rural education on nutrition and health and its impact on household behaviours.The research project, led by ISSER at the University of Ghana, Legon, is part of a USAID-funded collaborative research grant programme between Feed the Future Innovation Laboratory for Ma rkets, Risks and Resilience and the International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED).It sought to understand how using an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) message as a mode of communicating nutrition and WASH educational content to rural people could change behaviours in rural households for positive nutrition and health outcomes among the rural poor in northern Ghana.Prof. Osei said, 'After conducting research fieldwork over three years across four northern regions within 232 rural communities, the research project has found policy-relevant results.'He said malnutrition continued to be a public health challenge, especially in the northern sector, which needed the attention of all stakeholders to address the challenge.He said nutrition, health and sanitation were important components of a livelihood approach to tackling inequality, poverty, and deprivation.He appealed to stakeholders to practise nutrition education in the local languages to improve health-related knowledge, attitudes, and practices in rural areas.Dr Charles Yaw Okyere, a member of the Project Team, said the research found that at baseline, stunting was about 17.5 per cent, wasting was six per cent and underweights was about 12.3%, adding that 30% of the households studied had poor food consumption score.Dr Fidela Dake, a team member of the Research Project said so far, the project had impacted positively on nutrition outcomes and self-reported health after six months of sending messages to beneficiary households.She added that the messages, communicated through the IVR platform, had changed nutrition and water, sanitation, and hygiene perception among households with more people now taking hand washing and boiling of water before drinking as key health tools.Source: Ghana News Agency