Malawi’s national Early Childhood Development (ECD) program is led by the Ministry of Gender, Children, Disability and Social Welfare (MoGCDSW) and consists of support to pre-schools, commonly known as community-based childcare centers (CBCCs) and parenting groups. The national program is being scaled-up across Malawi with support from development partners and civil society. Additionally, the Government of Malawi with support from the World Bank’s Investing in Early Years (IEY) project is scaling-up an integrated ECD agriculture-nutrition intervention in 13 districts across Malawi. Evidence generated by the Nutrition Embedded Evaluation Program Impact Evaluation (NEEP-IE) conducted by IFPRI, Save the Children and Chancellor College, has been central to the design of both the Government ECD program and the World Bank’s IEY program. The NEEP-IE, which was conducted using a cluster randomized control trial in 60 communities in Zomba district between 2015 and 2017, found that CBCCs with parenting groups were an effective platform to implement nutrition-sensitive agriculture interventions and improve food diversity and the diets of preschoolers, maternal knowledge and nutrition practices at household level. The follow-up results from this study show that the linear growth of children’s younger siblings was maintained after the program was phased out.
However, there is still little evidence on the costs and benefits of implementing multi-sectoral and integrated approaches to improve nutrition and this limits the ability of decision-makers to invest in them.
The SEEMS-Nutrition program, which is working in five countries including Malawi, addresses this knowledge gap by: (1) developing a typology of interventions; (2) mapping impact pathways and identifying program activities, inputs, and costs; (3) developing standardized cost data collection tools and collecting cost data alongside impact evaluations; and (4) comparing program costs and benefits to reflect the relevant question/decision and sector.
The SEEMS-Nutrition program is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is being implemented by the University of Washington, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Helen Keller International (HKI), Results for Development (R4D), and the International Livestock Institute (ILRI).
In using the evidence generated by the NEEP-IE, SEEMS-Nutrition will support the roll-out of the national ECD program by combining planning data and costs of the roll-out of activities across different district of Malawi. SEEMS-Nutrition will also generate scenario-based data on the costs and benefits of the ECD program activities and explore the costs of implementation during the scale-up process.
Against this background IFPRI Malawi met with Government and ECD stakeholders on December 10, 2019 to introduce the new SEEMS-Nutrition project. The meeting was attended by representatives of MoGCDSW, Department of Nutrition and HIV/AIDS (DNHA), World Bank, and four international and one local NGO.
Following the meeting, IFPRI was invited to present the project at an inter-sectoral meeting organized by the Investing in Early Years (IEY) team. Participants included representatives of MoGCDWS, Ministry of Health, Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, as well as Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development. A follow up meeting took place in mid-January 2020.
The presentation given during the meeting on December 10, 2019 is available as SlideShare below.
Click here to download the presentation as pdf.
Further reading
Aulo Gelli, Amy Margolies, Marco Santacroce, Natalie Roschnik, Aisha Twalibu, Mangani Katundu, Helen Moestue, Harold Alderman, Marie Ruel, Using a Community-Based Early Childhood Development Center as a Platform to Promote Production and Consumption Diversity Increases Children's Dietary Intake and Reduces Stunting in Malawi: A Cluster-Randomized Trial, The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 148, Issue 10, October 2018, Pages 1587–1597, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/nxy148
Aisha Twalibu, Aulo Gelli, Amy Margolies, Natalie Roschnik, Helen Moestue, Mangani Katundu, Melissa Gladstone and Patricia Kariger. 2018. An integrated agriculture-nutrition package to improve diets through community-based childcare centers in Malawi: The Nutrition Embedded Evaluation Program Impact Evaluation (NEEP-IE) study. Journal of Nutrition & Food Sciences. Abstract available here.
Donovan, Jason; and Gelli, Aulo. 2019. Designing interventions in local value chains for improved health and nutrition: Insights from Malawi. World Development Perspectives 16 (December 2019): 100149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2019.100149
IFPRI Malawi blog: Value chains to improve diets: Diagnostics to support intervention design in Malawi. October 2019.
