This report synthesizes the analysis and findings of a set of six country case studies that explore the impact of cash transfer (CT) programmes on household economic decision-making and the local economy in sub-Saharan Africa.

The study seeks to understand the impact of CT programmes in three interrelated areas:

• Household economy, i.e. the activities surrounding decisions on how to distribute resources within a beneficiary household.
• Local economy, i.e. the economic activities– the production and exchange of goods and services – beyond the beneficiary household, in the beneficiaries' communities.
• Social networks, specifically risk-sharing arrangements underpinned by social capital, and the contribution of beneficiaries to local decision-making...

As political commitment is an essential ingredient for elevating food and nutrition security onto policy agendas, commitment metrics have proliferated. Many conflate government commitment to fight hunger with combating undernutrition. This study tests the hypothesis that commitment to hunger reduction is empirically different from commitment to reducing undernutrition through expert surveys in five high-burden countries: Bangladesh, Malawi, Nepal, Tanzania, and Zambia. The findings confirm the hypothesis. The paper concludes that sensitive commitment metrics are needed to guide government and donor policies and programmatic action. Without these metrics being available to guide policy, historically inadequate prioritization of non-food aspects of malnutrition may persist to imperil achieving global nutrition...

Combining breastfeeding and other forms of work is desirable from both public health and labour productivity perspectives. This is often challenging, especially in low- or middle-income fast-growing urban settings. The aim of this thesis was to gain a deeper understanding of mothers’ perspectives on combining breastfeeding and other work in the urban contexts of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and New Delhi, India. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with community mothers (n=8) and health worker mothers (n=12) in Dar es Salaam, and mothers working in the health (n=10) and education sectors (n=10) in New Delhi.

The methods of analysis were: qualitative content analysis, grounded theory approach, and directed and general inductive content analyses. Mothers’ agency manifested in several ways. Striving to integrate or segment the competing domains of home and work was a goal of these mothers to reduce conflicts in managing breastfeeding and other work. Spatial and time constraints led mothers to engage in an array of carefully planned actions and troubleshooting tactics that included ways of ensuring proximity between them and their baby and efficient time managing. The timing of these strategic actions spanned from pregnancy, over maternity leave, to the return to employment. Managing breastfeeding and work triggered emotions such as stress, frustration and guilt, but also satisfaction and joy. Mothers negotiated with family, employers, colleagues and informal networks to gain support for their strategies, displaying both individual, collective and proxy agency.

Changing family structures and roles highlight the potentially greater supportive role of the partner/husband. Work/Family Border Theory and Bandura’s agency constructs provided frameworks for a deeper understanding of mothers’ perspectives, but using existing family relationship constructs would better differentiate between various modes of agency. Workplaces and maternity protection conditions were generally inadequate. Interventions are required: to strengthen the breastfeeding mother’s own agential capacity using an individual approach; to provide information to families and communities; to improve regulatory, structural and attitudinal conditions at workplaces, and to strengthen health and social services to adequately support mothers in managing breastfeeding and other work. It also addresses the issue of of women needing support outside the formal work environment where such policies do not cover them- being in the non-formal or informal sector.

Adapted from...

This Brief presents the findings of the Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in East Africa (LANEA) initiative in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. LANEA investigates opportunities and challenges to scaling up nutrition through agriculture.

The paper highlights how knowledge of the linkages between agriculture and nutrition is low in all three countries, with surveys showing the need for training and education at a number of levels. Individual reports for all three countries recommend ways to better integrate the two sectors, by strengthening knowledge and evidence of the role of agriculture for nutrition, and the capacity of local agents to share and disseminate this...

The Government of Ethiopia’s (GoE’s) economic growth strategy, Agriculture Development Led Industrialization (ADLI, formulated in 1991), places very high priority on accelerating agricultural growth and achieving food security. Agriculture is also a main focus of the current GoE’s Growth and Transformation Plan, as was also the case for its predecessors. The effort to modernise the […]

Raising agricultural productivity is the principal challenge facing African agriculture, including in Tanzania. Agriculture in Tanzania accounts to 27 percent of GDP, 80 percent of employment, 75 percent of household income and is a key component for the country strategy for poverty reduction. One area that has received a lot of attention is that of […]

Pregnancy is a state of increased requirement of macro- and micronutrients, and malnourishment or inadequate dietary intake before and during pregnancy, can lead to adverse perinatal outcomes including stillbirths. Many nutritional interventions have been proposed during pregnancy according to the nutritional status of the mother and baseline risk factors for different gestational disorders. This paper […]

Given the widespread prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies in developing countries, supplementation with multiple micronutrients rather than iron-folate alone, could be of potential benefit to the mother and the fetus. These benefits could relate to prevention of maternal complications and reduction in other adverse pregnancy outcomes such as small-for-gestational age (SGA) births, low birth weight, stillbirths, […]

Supplementation with multiple micronutrients (MM) during pregnancy may result in improved pregnancy and infant outcomes. The study conducted meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials that evaluated the effects of prenatal supplementation with MM (defined as containing at least five micronutrients and typically included iron or iron and folic acid). The outcomes of interest are low birth […]

The effect of prenatal zinc supplementation on birth weight is controversial as randomised controlled trials (RCTs) report conflicting conclusions. A systematic review which includes meta-analysis was done on 17 RCTs conducted worldwide since 1984 to assess the effect of prenatal zinc supplementation on birth weight. The studies were identified through web-based search. Heterogeneity among studies […]