Baseline survey for improving nutritional outcomes, child health and understanding the practices of outreach workers for malaria treatment in Madhya Pradesh, India

CHAI proposed to work in partnership with the Government of MP (GovMP), which was committed to an ambitious, large-scale approach and motivated to drive down the state’s high rates of undernutrition and anemia, relative to national averages. To achieve these ambitious goals, the intervention addressed the following objectives:
1. Bridge supply, design, and implementation gaps in anemia control programs.
2. Improve the nutritional value of Take Home Rations (THR) for children and for pregnant women.
3. Improve supply chain and distribution systems of the ICDS scheme.
4. Improve hygiene and sanitation conditions in areas with high burden of malnutrition.
5. Develop the capacity of front-line workers to provide a continuum of care for all forms of undernutrition, improve young child feeding practices and enhance data reporting systems.

The proposed study was designed to establish the baseline figures for key program indicators against which the impact of the program was measured over time. Since the program covered the entire state, there was no control group, or control sites to establish the counterfactual.
Therefore, to measure changes brought about by the program, the evaluation adopted a prepost cross-sectional design without a comparison group. For assessment of the same, a sample size of 12,150 households were covered from 417 PSUs spread across the entire state of MP.