| dc.description.abstract | Introduction
The study took place in Kamwenge district, over 236.95 km west of Kampala. Its purpose was to determine the extent to which nutrition interventions of Developing and Delivering Biofortified Crops project have addressed malnutrition among children aged between 6-59 months. The specific objectives were ;-to compare rates of malnutrition among children age 6- 59 months in nutrition intervention and non-intervention areas, to determine the proportion of mothers observing proper feeding practices, to establish barriers to appropriate improvements in child’s nutrition status, to gather strategies geared towards improvements of the Developing and Delivering Bio fortified Crops project and to examine the influence of nutrition interventions that had been applied with in the DDBC project on mothers’ knowledge and feeding practices.
Methodology
A cross sectional descriptive comparative study was used and a sample of 240 mothers with children aged 6-59 months was considered of which 50% came from the intervention sub county and the other 50 % came from the non-intervention sub county. In each sub county the 120 mothers with their children aged 6-59 months were randomly selected and consent to participate in the study was sort, data was collected and checked for consistency, accuracy and completeness on a daily basis. Finally it was coded, entered in SPSS later exported to STATA for analysis. Frequencies were run for both study groups and comparisons of malnutrition, feeding practices, nutrition knowledge were run and are comparatively reported. Independent paired two sample t tests were conducted to establish the associations between the interventions and mothers nutritional knowledge and feeding practices.
Results
Malnutrition varied across the study sub counties with the intervention sub county having lower levels of stunting(16.67%) and underweight(13.33%) compared to (36.67%) and (16.67%) in non-intervention sub county. High nutrition knowledge and good child feeding practices were highly exhibited in the intervention sub county as compared to the non-intervention sub county. The three nutrition interventions which were nutrition trainings, presence of lead mothers, production and consumption of Vitamin A orange sweet potato and high iron beans were significant in explaining mother’s knowledge and child feeding practices as care givers who had access to the three intervention performed far better than those who didn’t have access to these interventions. Many barriers to appropriate improvements in child feeding were reported by the care givers ranging from financial constraints, insufficient training materials, drought and inadequate nutrition knowledge among others.
Conclusion and recommendations
In conclusion the intervention sub county had a good performance towards mothers’ nutrition knowledge and feeding practices which were attributed to the DDBC’s interventions. Subsequently the study came up with recommendations which include the need to provide more nutrition trainings, increasing access to planting material of orange sweet potato and iron beans and increase in the number of lead mothers among others. | en_US |
