Health Extension

Since 2012, through a series of pilot projects, we drew lessons that helped adapt our approach to health and nutrition messaging among rural communities who often receive scattered information regarding health and nutrition, and are often unaware of the government welfare programs that are in place or the importance of availing them. The pilots helped us adapt and revise our video-based extension approach for effective implementation of health and nutrition projects, which required more nuanced content and treatment than in agriculture. Our teams worked on improving our in-house Data Management Systems to capture data and analyse trends related to the health better.

Samvad: Digital Community Engagement Platforms for Improving Family Planning, Maternal ChildHealth and Nutrition Outcomes

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Partner Organizations

2015-2021

Project Samvad, is a USAID-funded project aimed ataddressing Family Planning, Maternal Child Health and Nutrition goals.Digital Green collaborates with existing health system structures —including India’s State Rural Livelihood Missions and state-level agencies of the National Health Mission, as well as other local organizations trusted and active in the target districts –to build their capacity to employ video-and other ICT-enabled approaches to increase adoption of optimal maternal, infant and child health and nutrition and family planning practices. The project has directly reached 544,000 women in five states (Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand) through facilitated community videos. We have incorporated a range of ICT solutions and mass media and mid-media platforms to complement and supplement video messages, including radio and village campaigns; focused mobile-based messaging on key thematic topics; calls with targeted, life-stage specific messages in the 1000 days period; and use of technology to improve interpersonal counselling by frontline workers. These platforms have reached 1.9 million individuals. Use of data collection and analysis tools has helped our partners to better reach the target audiences. We maximize impact by linking demand generation with public supply-side interventions.

Market Intervention for Nutritional Improvemen

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Partner Organizations

2018-2021

Agricultural aggregation schemes such as Digital Green’sLoop projectcan provide numerous benefits to farmers, including strengthened bargaining power, reduced transportation costs and improved access to higher demand markets. However, as aggregation schemes are traditionally producer-facing, the nutritional needs of consumers in smaller markets may be overlooked. This project aims to assess the challenges and trade-offs of using aggregation to increase the availability and affordability of fruits and vegetables in nutritionally vulnerable markets in India and Bangladesh through a value chain approach.Read thisto know more about the research.The Market Intervention for Nutritional Improvement (MINI) project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the UK Department for International Development (DfID),is led by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS,University of London) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI, Vietnam), the project involves researchers from theLondon School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM),Bangladesh Agricultural University(BAU, Dhaka) andLincoln University, New Zealand, and Digital Green

Upscaling Participatory Action and Videos for Agriculture and Nutrition (UPAVAN)

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Partner Organizations

2018-2021

Maternal and child undernutrition is one of the world’s most serious health, economic and human development challenges. Child undernutrition causes an estimated 3.1 million child deaths annually, and one-third of women in South Asia are underweight. Maternal and child undernutrition have important consequences for pregnancy outcomes, children’s survival, child physical and cognitive development, and the incidence of acute and chronic diseases. The impacts of undernutrition also extend beyond health outcomes, with consequences for educational attainment, economic progress, and human wellbeing. There is an increasing scientific consensus that interventions to address immediate determinants of undernutrition (‘nutrition-specific’ interventions) are necessary but not sufficient: acceleration of progress in maternal and child nutrition will entail coupling these interventions with nutrition-sensitive programs that tackle the underlying causes of undernutrition. ‘Making agriculture work for nutrition’ is now a top policy priority but the evidence-base is weak, largely due to poorly designed studies that are unable to discern causal effects.Upscaling Participatory Action and Videos for Agriculture and Nutrition(UPAVAN) is a four-arm, clusterrandomized controlled trial(RCT) based in Keonjhar district, Odisha, India, aimed at assessing the nutrition and agricultural impact and cost-effectiveness of three types of interventions (compared with a control arm). The RCT has been designed and managed by LSHTM in partnership with Digital Green who takes care of the implementation side of it in partnership with implementing partners.

The three intervention arms are built on a set of pilot and feasibility studies (and a current intervention strengthening grant). The control arm (Arm 4) receives standard agriculture, health and nutrition-related services provided by the government or other organizations in Odisha, India.Voluntary Association for Rural Reconstruction and Appropriate Technology (VARRAT) is the primary implementing partner responsible for on-the-ground implementation, facilitating partner review meetings, and monitoring activities in collaboration with Digital Green and Ekjut. JSI Research and Training Institute (JSI) is the primary technical partner responsible for the design and execution of formative research and development of training materials on NSA and MIYCNtopics. JSI participated in a joint review of the operational protocol and implementation documents, prioritizing themes for video production, and strengthening VARRAT’s capacity to develop specific recommended practices (called the package of practices or PoPs) and video storyboards for each topic. Ekjut is responsible for the PLA cycle of meetings in Arm 3, including designing and developing materials, building the capacity of the community-level agents who implement the PLA cycle, providing supportive supervision, and monitoring the process.

Nutrition Sensitive Agriculture Intervention to Promote Maternal & Child Health

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Partner Organizations

2014-2016

Following a successful pilot with Strengthening Partnerships, Research, and Innovations in Nutrition (SPRING) to adapt Digital Green’s approach to promote maternal, infant, and young child nutrition (MIYCN) behaviors and practices in 2013, the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council Grand Challenges (BIRAC) funded a subsequent project to build on lessons learned through IFPRI’s evaluation of the initial pilot. The BIRAC-supported project explored how the Digital Green / SPRING approachcould be modified to increase adoption of MIYCN recommended practices.We partnered with the Voluntary Association for Rural Reconstruction and Appropriate Technology (VARRAT) to implement the project in the same region–working with 112 women’s self-help groups in 30 villages across Odisha. We also worked with Ekjut, a civil society organization, to design a structured participatory learning and action (PLA) approach to engage the women in the information being disseminated. Through a randomized controlledtrial, we tested both Digital Green’s existing approach and the newly designed PLA approach, and found that participants in both groups demonstrated significant increases in nutrition knowledge. This study led to the design and funding of a four-year, three arm, cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess the impact and cost-effectiveness of the program approaches piloted in the BIRAC project on agricultural and nutrition outcomes.

To learn more about the RCT you can find the full results here.

Community-Led Video Approach to Promote Maternal, Infant & Young Child Nutrition

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Partner Organizations

2012-2013

In 2012, the USAID-funded Strengthening Partnerships, Results, and Innovations in Nutrition Globally (SPRING) project launched a collaboration with Digital Green and the Voluntary Association for Rural Reconstruction and Appropriate Technology (VARRAT) to assess whether Digital Green’s approach–which had been focused on adoption of agricultural practices–could be adapted to promote maternal, infant, and young child nutrition (MIYCN) behaviors and practices.Digital Green worked with SPRING and VARRAT to implement a 12-month pilot across 30 villages in Odisha, which sought to develop local NGO capacity in MIYCN and to produce and disseminate 10 videos featuring MIYCN practices. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) conducted a study to examine the feasibility of using the new Digital Green/SPRING approach to promote adoption of MIYCN behaviors during the course of the pilot. The study found that the approach was highly promising, as the videos proved to be one of the key sources of nutrition-related information within the communities, and demand for them was high among the project’s target audience (women in self-help groups) and frontline workers. The full report can be accesshere. The results of the pilot and feasibility study led to a subsequent project in Odisha to advance IFPRI’s recommendations, and later inspired additional SPRING / Digital Green collaborations in additional geographies. The full report of the pilot and feasibility study can be found here.