Proposal Description

Nutrition is a multifaceted challenge that requires coordinated action from all stakeholders. In response to this, the Government of the Republic of Zambia has introduced District Nutrition Coordinators (DNCs) to ensure that every sector including the Ministry of Agriculture, Community, Education and other partners integrates nutrition into its work, with dedicated nutritionist coordinators at district level. These were employed in selected districts in order to scale up nutrition. The project aims at enhancing the resilience of vulnerable populations in terms of food and nutrition specific.
DNCs help raise awareness of nutrition among other things by offering training to local health workers and community groups on Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) practices, driving adoption of behaviours that prevent stunting and wasting. A comparison of data on anthropometric measures between 2018 and 2024 indicates that stunting has decreased from 35 percent to 32 percent, while wasting has remained relatively stable from 4 percent to 3 percent in 2018 and 2024 respectively (ZDHS 2018 and 2024).
Despite the introduction of the District Nutrition Coordinators to raise awareness on food and nutrition in the districts, the contribution toward nutrition is not clear, the impact of this intervention has not yet been evaluated. In this regard, this researcher aims to find answers to the effectiveness of the nutritional coordinators among the programme beneficiaries in Zambia. There is scanty information regarding its impacts and the challenges faced in the implementation of the exercise. Questions have been raised on the extent to which the technical and financial resources are being made available to facilitate its full implementation. There is need to have a knowledge base from which to build on the proven strengths and weaknesses of the project.
This study aims to establish the impact of District Nutrition Coordinators on nutrition. It aims to determine whether the intervention has led to the observed changes in the outcome and to quantify the magnitude of this effect. This involves comparing the outcomes between the 2018 and 2024 Zambia Demographic Health Survey (ZDHS) data as the baseline and endline respectively, alternatively the researcher wants to establish the outcomes of districts that have District Nutritional Officers and those that do not.
The question remains, can nationally representative collected statistics and datasets such as the Zambia Demographic Health Survey and the Rural Agriculture Livelihood Survey be able to track nutrition outcomes? To address this question, the author will use this data to understand the impact of these officers using DIfference-in-Differences (DiD) in order to estimate causal effects by comparing changes in outcomes over time between a treatment group and a control group. It helps control for time-varying confounders and can be particularly useful when randomization is not feasible. Since the DNCs are introduced in selected districts, while other districts continue without DNCs, DiD will be used to assess the impact on nutrition by comparing changes in the districts with and without DNCs before and after the policy change. The assumption is that an intervention is unrelated to the outcome at baseline.