Development of holistic metrics for food and water insecurity and school-age child function for nutrition-sensitive programmes

Project Summary

Principal investigator(s):

Andrew Prendergast Zvitambo Institute for Maternal and Child Health and Queen Mary University of London

Duration:

24 months (from February 2021)

Value:

£249,885

Countries of research:

Zimbabwe

Zvitambo Institute for Maternal and Child Health

Collaborators:

Robert Ntozini, Zvitambo Institute
Joseph Piper, Queen Mary University of London
Naume Tavengwa, Zvitambo Institute for Maternal and Child Health Research
Laura Smith, University at Buffalo
Jonathan Wells, UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health
Melissa Gladstone, University of Liverpool
Elizabeth Allen, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Nadia Koyratty, University at Buffalo
Tim Brown, Queen Mary University of London
Frances Knight, World Food Programme
Godfred Boateng, University of Texas
Roseanne Schuster, University of Arizona
Maggie Makanza, Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)
Lisa Langhaug, Zvitambo Institute for Maternal and Child Health Research

The overall goal of this project is to develop outcome metrics to assess school-age child growth and function. The lack of suitable long-term metrics may have underestimated the impact of nutrition and agriculture interventions to date, because research studies and programme evaluations rely on proxy outcomes such as linear growth by age two.

Using baseline data from the Sanitation Hygiene Infant Nutrition Efficacy (SHINE) cohort in rural Zimbabwe, the project aims to:

1) Develop a detailed toolbox (“SAHARAN”) to comprehensively assess child growth, physical and cognitive development;

2) Use factor analysis followed by reliability and agreement analyses to develop two novel, holistic and succinct outcome metrics to assess school-age cognitive function (“COG-SAHARAN”), and child growth, chronic-disease risk and physical function (“GROW-SAHARAN”). Researchers will also evaluate the value of a combined metric (“SUBSAHARAN”) providing a holistic measure of school-age outcomes;

3) Operationalise these new metrics in a cohort of rural Zimbabwean school-age children to test feasibility, acceptability and metric performance, then develop a toolbox to facilitate adaptation of these metrics to other cultures and contexts.

The innovative open-source metrics developed by the project to assess child functional outcomes will have translational applicability in programme evaluations and impact assessments. They will advance understanding of how early-life adversities and interventions shape long-term child function beyond simple linear growth during the first thousand days.