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A child eats fruit in Mozambique.
Photo Credit: CNFA

Optimal dietary intake is pivotal for children's growth and development. Minimum Dietary Diversity (MDD) is a widely-used indicator that assesses one measure of diet quality among infants and young children aged 6-23 months, and is one of the standard infant and young child feeding (IYCF) indicators in the Global Nutrition Monitoring Framework. Dietary data has historically been collected through one of two 24-hour recall methods: list-based and open recall (with multiple pass). However, the accuracy and comparative costs of each method were unknown, impeding informed decisions about which method to use in different scenarios.

During this webinar, speakers presented a study USAID Advancing Nutrition conducted to fill this knowledge gap—comparing the equivalence and cost of the two methods in Cambodia and Zambia. Findings will provide evidence-based recommendations to inform dietary data collection among young children in LMIC. This study provides important information for understanding the benefits and costs of two common dietary data collection methods and facilitating improvement of the design, monitoring, and evaluation of nutrition programs for infants and young children.

Webinar Recording

Webinar Resources

Speakers

  • Lidan Du-Skabrin (moderator) is a senior research advisor on USAID Advancing Nutrition’s monitoring, evaluation, and learning team. She leads and supports the closing and documentation of select research activities across the project. Lidan has over 20 years of experience supporting direct and indirect nutrition programming and evidence generation on USAID centrally-funded projects; consulting for FAO, UNICEF, and the World Bank; and working with state cooperative extension and Fortune 500 companies.
  • Jennifer Yourkavitch is the director of monitoring, evaluation, and learning at USAID Advancing Nutrition. She is an epidemiologist and lactation consultant whose research and applied work measures, documents, and addresses determinants of health and nutrition. For more than 25 years she has designed, implemented, monitored and evaluated public health programs and conducted research. She holds an adjunct faculty appointment in the Maternal and Child Health Department in the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and serves on WHO’s advisory groups for anemia and maternal and newborn measurement.
  • Amry Ok is a consultant with SBK Research and Development with more than 20 years of experience in project management, project monitoring and evaluation and social research, and providing capacity building training. He has been involved in more than 60 different consulting assignments, mainly in the field of nutrition, child health, reproductive health, including evaluation missions, baseline surveys, midterm reviews. He has written and contributed to dozens of research reports.
  • Chiza Kumwenda is a senior lecturer at the University of Zambia, School of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Food Science and Nutrition. He has over 10 years of professional experience in maternal and child nutrition. Chiza has worked on several dietary intake assessment projects among children and women, and led this study of dietary data collection methods in Zambia. He was also on the team from Zambia on a multi-country study that aimed at refining the data collection tools for minimum dietary diversity for women.
  • Elise Reynolds is a PhD candidate in the graduate group in nutritional biology with a designated emphasis in global nutrition at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests are in child and adolescent nutrition in low-income settings and the role of food systems and food environments on diets and nutritional status of populations. She has worked on projects in Peru and Kenya.
  • Christine Stewart serves as the Corinne L. Rustici Endowed Chair in Applied Human Nutrition, director of the Institute for Global Nutrition, and professor in the Department of Nutrition at University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the design and evaluation of nutrition and health interventions for women and young children in low-income communities. She examines the effects of these interventions on child survival, growth, health, and development throughout the life course. She uses primarily community-based randomized controlled trials, longitudinal studies, and meta-analyses to synthesize evidence to inform improvements in programs or policy. Christine collaborates extensively with multidisciplinary and multinational teams and has had recent projects in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Malawi, Ghana, and Kenya.
  • Erin Milner is a senior nutrition monitoring, evaluation, and learning advisor at USAID, where she leads nutrition programs and measurement initiatives. She has over 15 years of international experience designing and implementing nutrition, early childhood development, and health projects. Erin has led research on nutrition linkages with ecosystems, food security, WASH, and early childhood development, and directed several environmental health monitoring and evaluation programs throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Erin also served in the Peace Corps in Ghana.