A clinic in Herat province where WFP provides nutrition assistance
Afghanistan isn’t a place where it’s easy to have a picture of the food security and nutrition situation. Security challenges, difficulty in physically accessing certain parts of the country, and a limited number of mobile phone numbers for key informants in some areas are just some of the obstacles mVAM faces when collecting data remotely.
When it comes to reaching women, it certainly doesn’t get any easier – low literacy rates, limited access to mobile phones (especially in rural areas), and gender norms which make face-to-face surveys difficult all present additional challenges.
At the same time, Afghanistan is a country with one of the highest rates of malnutrition among women and young children: 41% of children under five years of age are stunted and suffer irreversible harm due to chronic malnutrition. A range of factors contribute to malnutrition in Afghanistan: poor nutrient intake, diseases, poor hygiene and sanitation, as well as limited awareness related to child feeding practices.
How, then, can we gather enough information from women to better understand their nutritional status and that of the children they care for, and target our nutrition assistance accordingly?
Luckily, the mVAM team in Afghanistan came up with a creative solution: working with health center staff in the country to help us monitor women’s food consumption remotely.
Women waiting for nutrition assistance at a clinic in Herat province
In October 2017, the mVAM team collected the mobile phone numbers of staff members at eight health centres in four provinces (Kandahar, Herat, Khost and Nanaghar). The selected clinics are in areas where WFP-supported targeted supplementary feeding programmes (TSFP) are being implemented. Malnourished, pregnant, and lactating women visit these clinics monthly to be monitored and to receive WFP nutrition assistance.
The mVAM operators in Kabul called the staff at the clinics during these weekly distribution times, so staff could pass their mobile phones around to the women visiting the centres, allowing operators to interview them using the minimum dietary diversity for women (MDD-W) tool along with some other questions about the TSFP activity implementation.
A female operator conducts interviews to collect nutrition data over the phone
Overall, this strategy worked well. One of the obstacles the operators encountered was that women often found it hard to understand the meaning of the questions on food consumption. However, our well-trained female operators were able to engage with the women in their local languages and provide further explanations, so we were able to make sure our respondents understood the questions and could provide reliable answers.
Our next step in Afghanistan is to collect dietary and nutrition data using this method on a regular basis, expanding the geographical coverage to other provinces where WFP is supporting TSFP activities, and interviewing a larger number of women. To facilitate the data collection process, we will also be distributing mobile phones to relevant staff at the health centres where WFP provides nutrition assistance, specifically for the purpose of collecting information on women’s diets. This will help avoid staff members having to use their personal mobile phones, which they need for their daily communications at work.
With their efforts to collect data on women’s nutrition, the mVAM team in Afghanistan is contributing to global efforts to fill the data gap on nutrition, especially by providing information on women’s nutrition in hard-to-reach areas of the country.
Also published on Medium.