Impact of Nutrition Education on the Nutrition Capacity of Caregivers and Nutrition Outcomes of Indigenous Mbororo Children in the West Region of Cameroon: Protocol for a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial.

BACKGROUND

Inadequate diets and life-threatening infections have profound adverse implications for child growth, development, and survival, particularly among indigenous peoples. Evidence of the effectiveness of community-based nutrition education interventions in improving child feeding and nutrition outcomes among indigenous Mbororo population in Cameroon is scarce.

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to investigate the impact of culturally tailored community-based nutrition education intervention on caregivers' knowledge, attitude, and practice regarding complementary feeding and on nutrition outcomes of indigenous Mbororo children (aged 3-59 months) in the Foumban and Galim health districts of the West Region of Cameroon.

METHODS

A two-arm cluster randomized controlled trial will be conducted in the Foumban Health District and Galim Health District. The intervention and control arms will each comprise 5 clusters with 121 child-caregiver pairs. Participants in the intervention arm will be organized into 5 caregivers' peer-support platforms. A total of 12 educational sessions will be assigned to the intervention group by trained female Mbororo nutrition volunteers (n=6) and community health workers (n=6). The control arm will receive routine facility-based nutrition education. Data will be collected at 3-month and 6-month follow-up. Both descriptive statistics and multivariate logistic models will be used to estimate the effect of culturally tailored community-based nutrition education intervention (independent variable) on outcome variables (caregivers' knowledge, attitude, and practice), child growth (weight, height/length, weight for age), and morbidity status (diarrhea, cough, and fever) between both arms. Data assessors will be blinded to the group allocation. Ethical approval (reference no. 2019/1002-07/UB/SG/IRB/FHS) was obtained from the Faculty of Health Sciences Institutional Review Board at the University of Buea.

RESULTS

Baseline data were collected in September 2019. In February 2020, 10 Mbororo communities (clusters) with 242 child-caregiver pairs were selected and allocated to the experimental and control arm in a 1:1 ratio. Community nutrition volunteers (n=6) and community health workers (n=6) were selected and trained. Data collection and analysis are ongoing, and results are not available for this manuscript.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings of this study will provide evidence on the impact of culturally tailored and health belief model-based nutrition education on behavior change as a complementary strategy for strengthening health facility-based approaches in the reduction of malnutrition burden among the study population.

INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/23115.