| Reporting Organization: | Nutrition International |
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| Total Budget ($CAD): | $ 750,000 |
| Timeframe: | November 1, 2018 - November 30, 2020 |
| Status: | Completion |
| Contact Information: |
Sara Wuehler |
| Ethiopia - $ 375,000.00 (50.00%) | |
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| Senegal - $ 375,000.00 (50.00%) | |
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| Nutrition (40 %) | |
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| Health Systems, Training & Infrastructure (20 %) | |
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| Gender Equality (40 %) | |
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There is no established measurement framework to assess how nutrition and empowerment interacts and affects diverse communities and across nutrition interventions. Minimizing the data gaps and advancing knowledge of the relationship of gender equality and women’s empowerment and nutrition is relevant to inform local women’s groups and host country response to policy and advocacy. These data problems prevent us from fully understanding the influence that empowerment has on a woman and adolescent girl’s nutritional status. Nutrition International sought to bridge some of these gaps through development of their Nutrition Intervention Monitoring System toolkit, or “NIMS.” The aims of this toolkit are to standardize survey data collection, assure quality and timely data reporting and to integrate gender-related data into NIMS that meet next-generation monitoring needs.
This evolving multi-year project builds on the unique strengths of each institution. The Campbell Collaboration is leading research on the gender components while the University of Toronto is leading the research for updates to the NIMS toolkit. NI provides program-related technical support and contextualization to both institutions as well as managing in-country activities.
| Gender and age: | Adult women Adult men Adolescent females Children, girls Children, boys Under-5 children |
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| Total Direct Population: | Unspecified |
| 3 | Conference presentations delivered |
| 90 | Staff trainings conducted |
• Adapting standardized tools: Nutrition International’s standardized Nutrition Intervention Monitoring System (NIMS) toolkits will be adapted for routine monitoring and as a decision-making tool for NI Program Managers. Gender indicators will be integrated into the toolkits, as well as practical methods for quality assessment of the resulting data to streamline monitoring and surveys.
• Establish a strong conceptual model: Develop a model which can be used by nutrition program implementers to: design and implement adolescent nutrition interventions that address gender inequities in nutrition outcomes; and, to assess equity effectiveness of interventions.
• Harness existing databases: Understand the relationship between indicators of adolescent girls’ empowerment and their nutritional status using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from Ethiopia and Senegal.
• Capacity-strengthening: Advancing the learning of students and in-country program and surveillance staff will be a focus throughout the project with experiential learning and professional development embedded into the team structure.
• Completed formative review of the NIMS survey protocols to assess needs and gaps in sampling, sample size and survey design and formative analysis on data quality and validation measures. This process resulted in a streamlined and standardized NIMS toolkit which includes generic sampling protocols, questionnaires and tabulation plans, quality assurance checklists, ready to use SPSS syntax, standardized metrics for implementing quality control and quality assurance and incorporation of program-related gender indicators.
• Conducted a literature review of gender and empowerment indicators used in health and nutrition research. The results were used to inform the development of a statistical model of the relationship between women and adolescent girls’ empowerment and their nutritional status in East and West Africa.
• Produced a conceptual model and the literature review to select a series of 13 gender indicators that were piloted in the 2019 NIMS surveys. These indicators assess women’s empowerment regarding their economic power, asset ownership, freedom of movement, time use and household decision-making power. Based on the results of the statistical modelling, it was recommended to include indicators that assess access to information, control over sexual and reproductive health decision-making, and views on gender norms. A collaborative effort was undertaken to develop the model for adolescent girls.
• Expanded and simplified routine monitoring tools for assessing and coursecorrecting nutrition interventions using gender indicators. Quality metrics were integrated into NI’s Nutrition Interventions Monitoring Survey (NIMS) toolkit.
• Trained NI programming staff on the use of the expanded NIMS toolkit in routine monitoring and collected feedback.
