Professor Robert Darko Osei, the Research Project Lead of the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) has urged stakeholders to support digital communication technologies to address malnutrition in rural areas.

He said there was a huge gain and potential in using digital communication to effect changes in nutrition behaviour among poor households.

Professor Osei said this during a stakeholder’s engagement workshop on findings of a three-year research project in four Northern Regions titled: “Using Digital Communication to Reinforce Nutrition and Household Resilience in Northern Ghana".

The workshop educated on the research findings aimed to assess whether digital communication can be deployed for rural education on nutrition and health and its impact on household behaviours.

This research project, led by the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana, Legon, is part of a USAID-funded collaborative research grant programme between Feed the Future Innovation Laboratory for markets, risks and resilience under the USAID and the International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED).

It sought to understand the use of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) messages as a mode of communicating nutrition and WASH educational content to rural to change behaviours in rural households for positive nutrition and health outcomes among the rural poor in Northern Ghana.

"After conducting research fieldwork over 3 years across four northern regions within 232 rural communities, the research project has found policy-relevant results," Professor Osei added.
He indicated that malnutrition continued to be a public health challenge, especially in the northern sector which needed the attention of all stakeholders to address the challenge.

According to Professor Osei, nutrition, health and sanitation were important components of the livelihood approach to tackling inequality, poverty and deprivation.

He appealed to stakeholders to practice nutrition education in the local languages to improve health-related knowledge, attitudes and practices in rural areas.

Dr Charles Yaw Okyere, who is part of the project Team said, the research found that at baseline, stunting is about 17.5 per cent, wasting is six per cent and weight is about 12.3 per cent according to the 2022 Demographic and Health Survey.

According to him, malnutrition affected child educational outcomes and was more pronounced in the Northern regions of Ghana.

He stated that in the research, 30 per cent of the households studied had a poor food consumption score.

Dr Fidela Dake, a team member of the research project said so far the project had impacted positively on nutrition outcomes and self-reported health after six months of sending messages to beneficiary households.

She added that these messages, communicated through the IVR platform had changed nutrition and WASH perception among households and now more people took hand washing and boiling of water before drinking as key health tools.