Weaning Food Hygiene - Nepal

About

Building on findings from Mali, Bangladesh and other handwashing interventions, SHARE funded a PhD student, Om Prasad Gautam, to creatively design, effectively deliver and robustly evaluate an intervention to change the food hygiene behaviours of mothers in rural Nepal.

The whole intervention was designed, implemented and evaluated using the five key steps of Behaviour Centred Design, ABCDE.

The first step, Assess (A), involved systematic research to understand the evidence gap. The second step, Build (B), used formative research to understand the determinants of behaviours, motives, barriers and touch-points to inform intervention design. In the third step, Create (C), a multidisciplinary team used a creative process to design a food hygiene intervention. In step four, Deliver (D), locally recruited female food hygiene motivators used novel approaches at six events and household visits in the intervention group. The campaign inspired mothers with a young child to be an ‘ideal mother’. In the final step, Evaluate (E), the effect of the intervention was evaluated using a randomised control trial (before and after study with control design).

The intervention was effective in significantly altering mothers’ food hygiene behaviours and reducing the level of microbiological contamination in a child’s food. After the intervention, mothers practicing all key behaviours significantly increased from 2% to 43% in the intervention group, and remained the same in the control group (2%).