PCD Dubai Cares Nutrition Project’s Community- based Behaviour Change Communication (BCC)
BACKGROUND
School Feeding as a Nutritional Intervention Strategy
SFPs are said to have 3 major impacts (Bennett 2003; Hall 2007). The 1st impact is the improvement of the nutritional status of school-going children and the reduction of malnutrition rates. The 2nd includes the improvement of school enrolment, school attendance and cognitive performance, also reducing the gender gap herein. The 3rd impact is the effect of school feeding on the demand for locally produced foods. Since many of the nutritional and growth problems occur in the first 2 years of life, it is appropriate to mention that a life cycle approach is needed to improve nutritional status. Improving nutritional status is thought to require a range of interventions, varying from supplementary feeding for mothers and young children to school feeding and other food based strategies (Bennett 2003; Allen 2001; Hall 2007). This may indicate that school feeding programmes on their own may not be sufficient to improve nutritional status of primary school children. Some studies however indicate an improvement of Body Mass Index (BMI) in primary school children participating in breakfast supplementation programmes of 0.62 (Ahmed 2004) and 0.23 and 0.28 in undernourished children and adequately nourished children respectively (Powell 1998). An evaluation of an SFP in Vietnam by Hall et al. (2007) showed that children in the SFP schools gained significantly more weight (0.24 kg, p=0.001) and height (0.27 cm, p=0.008) than children in the control group, but these increases could also be attributable to seasonal variation in food consumption and occasional de-worming and not only the food supplements. Whether the improvement of nutritional status is due to improved nutrient intake through SFPs has not been studied in much detail. A study by Meme et al. (1998) indicated a higher lunch time caloric intake in children participating in an SFP compared to the control group, but no significant difference in stunting percentages could be determined.
The Dubai Cares Nutrition project is aimed at supporting the education, health and nutrition of school going age children living in poverty and food insecure regions. To enhance the benefits that communities and school children will derive from the project, PCD is providing technical support to the government of Ghana, in the implantation of the project.
The project has three main components:
Improving the quality of school feeding ration
Behavior Change Communication and
Deworming
It is therefore, in view of the BCC component which is also sub-divided into two – mass media campaign and inter-personal communication that CCEYD is chosen to implement the inter-personal communication which involves the use of community base volunteers to educate the people within their communities.
Eventually, the project activities reached out to 16,092 people within the district. The number of people reached is segregated as follows
| Type of engagement | # of engagement | # of people reached |
| Churches and mosques based | 159 | 4928 |
| Household based | 2698 | 6043 |
| Others | 128 | 5092 |
| Volunteers monitored | 29 | 29 |