Abstract
The Reaching End Users (REU) project introduced orange sweet potatoes (OSP) to farmers in northern Mozambique between 2006 and 2009, and the associated cluster randomised control trial found increased vitamin A intake among targeted children and women of child-bearing age and reduced prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intake. Yet little is known about whether successful agricultural-nutrition interventions have lasting effects. This study measures the lasting effects of the REU project, 3 years after the project ended, on vitamin A intake. To do so, dietary intake data were collected in the same thirty-six villages as the original study, focusing on both women of child-bearing age and children under 6 years old, the latter including both children who had been measured before and younger children (under 3 years old) in the same farmer groups. The dietary intake is then converted to micronutrient intake to compare treated households with control households. Vitamin A intake remains higher in treated villages than in control villages among both children under 3 years old, who had not been born when the original intervention ended, and mothers of child-bearing age. Differences in vitamin A intake can wholly be attributed to differences in OSP intake. Therefore, the REU project appears to have had lasting impacts on vitamin A intake beyond the intervention period. Had the vine retention component been enhanced, lasting impacts could have been even larger.
Highlights
Interventions that combine agriculture and nutrition are thought to have the potential to improve outcomes in less developed countries, but there only a few interventions that have successfully demonstrated, in a rigorous manner, that nutrition outcomes can be improved through agricultural interventions
Recent reviews of the effectiveness of nutrition-sensitive agricultural programmes suggest that while there have been a wide variety of programmes implemented, only a few randomised evaluations have been conducted that show positive impacts on nutrition outcomes[1,2,3]. One such set of evaluations is derived from the Reaching End Users (REU) project in Mozambique and Uganda[4,5], which demonstrated the introduction of orange sweet potatoes (OSP) increased vitamin A intake among both targeted children and their mothers and reduced the prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intake in both countries
Irrespective of whether the crosssection included in the survey in 2012 or the strict panel of households included in the baseline survey is considered, there is a significant decline in households growing OSP by 2012 in the treatment group, and fewer households in the control group were growing OSP in 2012
Summary
Interventions that combine agriculture and nutrition are thought to have the potential to improve outcomes in less developed countries, but there only a few interventions that have successfully demonstrated, in a rigorous manner, that nutrition outcomes can be improved through agricultural interventions. Recent reviews of the effectiveness of nutrition-sensitive agricultural programmes suggest that while there have been a wide variety of programmes implemented, only a few randomised evaluations have been conducted that show positive impacts on nutrition outcomes[1,2,3]. One such set of evaluations is derived from the Reaching End Users (REU) project in Mozambique and Uganda[4,5], which demonstrated the introduction of orange sweet potatoes (OSP) increased vitamin A intake among both targeted children and their mothers and reduced the prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intake in both countries. This paper reports on data collection that took place in 2012 to measure vitamin A intake among beneficiary communities 3 years after the REU project
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