Abstract
BackgroundThe SELEVER study is designed to evaluate the impact of an integrated agriculture–nutrition package of interventions (including poultry value chain development, women’s empowerment activities, and a behavior change communications strategy to promote improved diets and feeding, care, and hygiene practices) on the diets, health, and nutritional status of women and children in Burkina Faso. This paper presents the rationale and study design.MethodsThe impact evaluation involves a cluster randomized controlled trial design that will be implemented in 120 rural communities/villages within 60 communes supported by SELEVER in the Boucle de Mouhoun, Centre-Ouest, and Haut-Bassins regions of Burkina Faso. Communities will be randomly assigned to one of three treatment arms, including: (1) SELEVER intervention group; (2) SELEVER with an intensive WASH component; and (3) control group without intervention. Primary outcomes include the mean probability of adequacy of diets for women and children (aged 2–4 years at baseline), infant and young child feeding practices of caregivers of children aged 0–2 years, and household poultry production and sales. Intermediate outcomes along the agriculture and nutrition pathways will also be measured, including child nutrition status and development. The evaluation will follow a mixed-methods approach, including a panel of child-, household-, community-, and market-level surveys, and data collection points during post-harvest and lean seasons, as well as one year after implementation completion to examine sustainability.DiscussionTo our knowledge, this study is the first to rigorously examine from a food systems perspective, the simultaneous impact of scaling-up nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions through a livestock value-chain and community-intervention platform, across nutrition, health, and agriculture domains. The findings of this evaluation will provide evidence to support the design of market-based nutrition-sensitive interventions.Trial registrationISRCTN registry, ISRCTN16686478. Registered on 2 December 2016.
Highlights
The SELEVER study is designed to evaluate the impact of an integrated agriculture–nutrition package of interventions on the diets, health, and nutritional status of women and children in Burkina Faso
The value chains (VC) framework, encompassing every activity from food production to consumption, can provide a useful lens to examine the role of interventions in food systems to improve diets [5]
The focus to date in VC analysis has been on economic returns, overlooking the opportunities to influence diets more broadly [6]
Summary
The SELEVER study is designed to evaluate the impact of an integrated agriculture–nutrition package of interventions (including poultry value chain development, women’s empowerment activities, and a behavior change communications strategy to promote improved diets and feeding, care, and hygiene practices) on the diets, health, and nutritional status of women and children in Burkina Faso. The VC framework focuses on the broader range of actors that are involved in the production, processing, trade, and consumption of food products and the opportunities to achieve beneficial outcomes for some or all of the actors through changes in the structures, systems, and relationships that the chain involves. Agricultural development, especially related to expansion and formalization of markets, may inadvertently disempower women, by adding to their time burden and/or reducing their control over income, which could have negative consequences for diet and nutrition outcomes [7]
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