Ahmed Akhter, Coleman Fiona, Hoddinott John, Menon Purnima, Parvin Aklima, Pereira Audrey, Quisumbing Agnes, Roy Shalini
International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, United States.
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States.
Food Policy. 2023 Jul;118:102484. doi: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2023.102484.
We use a randomized controlled trial in rural Bangladesh to compare two models of delivering nutrition content jointly to husbands and wives: deploying female nutrition workers versus mostly male agriculture extension workers. Both approaches increased nutrition knowledge of men and women, household and individual diet quality, and women's empowerment. Intervention effects on agriculture and nutrition knowledge, agricultural production diversity, dietary diversity, women's empowerment, and gender parity do not significantly differ between models where nutrition workers versus agriculture extension workers provide the training. The exception is in an attitudes score, where results indicate same-sex agents may affect scores differently than opposite-sex agents. Our results suggest opposite-sex agents may not necessarily be less effective in providing training. In South Asia, where agricultural extension systems and the pipeline to those systems are male-dominated, training men to deliver nutrition messages may offer a temporary solution to the shortage of female extension workers and offer opportunities to scale and promote nutrition-sensitive agriculture. However, in both models, we find evidence that the presence of mothers-in-law within households modifies the programs' effectiveness on some nutrition, empowerment, and attitude measures, suggesting that accounting for other influential household members is a potential area for future programming.
我们在孟加拉国农村地区开展了一项随机对照试验，以比较两种向夫妻双方共同传授营养知识的模式：部署女性营养工作者与主要由男性组成的农业推广工作者。两种方法都提高了男性和女性的营养知识、家庭和个人饮食质量以及女性赋权。在由营养工作者与农业推广工作者提供培训的模式之间，对农业和营养知识、农业生产多样性、饮食多样性、女性赋权以及性别平等的干预效果没有显著差异。唯一的例外是在一项态度得分上，结果表明同性培训人员可能比异性培训人员对得分的影响有所不同。我们的结果表明，异性培训人员在提供培训方面不一定效果较差。在南亚，农业推广系统以及通往这些系统的渠道以男性为主导，培训男性传递营养信息可能为女性推广工作者短缺提供一个临时解决方案，并为扩大和推广营养敏感型农业提供机会。然而，在两种模式中，我们都发现有证据表明家庭中岳母的存在会改变项目在一些营养、赋权和态度指标上的效果，这表明将其他有影响力的家庭成员纳入考量是未来项目规划的一个潜在领域。
