Understanding How Dynamic Relationships Among Maternal Agency, Maternal Workload And The Food Environment Affect Food Choices (DRIVERS)
Donor: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Duration: 2018-2020
Introduction. Dietary food choices are driven by a complex interaction of individual and environmental factors. Women’s high agricultural workload limits the time they have available for acquiring, preparing food, and feeding infants, which may impact on their food choices.
Women’s agency and the local food environment will also likely influence food choices via decision-making and purchasing power and the availability, affordability, accessibility and desirability of food, which may change in response to changing maternal workloads. Little is known about interactions among women’s workload, the food environment and food choices in a rural low-income country setting.
Understanding these contextual factors will help predict positive or negative impacts of planned interventions, which affect women’s time use on diet quality and nutrition.
Objectives:
- To determine the impact of agriculture labor-saving devices on maternal food choices.
- To examine factors influencing these food choices and understand how they interact.
- To develop a tool that will predict how dynamic interactions among women’s time use and the external and personal food environments influence food choice to inform agriculture project intervention design and impact evaluations.
Methods: A mixed methods study will be conducted in 3 phases in rural Uganda. It will leverage data collected in an IMMANA-funded study which aims to validate innovative methods of measuring women’s time use and dietary diversity (n=264 mother-infant dyads).
Additional data will be collected for the proposed project to examine individual and environmental factors driving food choice among women living or not living in communities participating in Sasakawa Global 2000’s Post-harvest labor-saving technologies programme in Eastern Region.
In phase I: Geographical Information Systems (GIS) will be used to understand maternal exposure to the food environment (food source density and travel times) and how it interacts with labour savings to influence food choice. Market surveys will be carried out to obtain information on local food availability and costs.
In phase II: we will analyze data collected in Phase I and our IMMANA project, and provide insights into key drivers of food choice in this environment.
In phase III: 40 mothers (selected by market proximity and participation in a maternal labor-saving device project) will be asked to practice the maternal and child FBRs for 2 weeks (Trial of Improved Practice).
Participant interviews will explore motivations, facilitators and barriers to improved food choice practices. Actual dietary practices and maternal time use will be measured using tools developed and validated in the IMMANA project.
