Improving adoption of nutrition practices through Community Behaviour Tracking Mechanism (CBTM)

Project details

The Community Behaviour Tracking Tool (CBTT) is used to assess the adoption of key nutrition indicators at individual, household and community level in the ongoing MIYCN programme. The CBTT is a set of tools that comprises of three structured guides for implementors, cluster leader and care group promoters. The first tool for CBT programme is the standard operating procedure that provides guidance on how to implement the mechanism, how to use the tool and provides guidance on data flow. The second tool is a structured guide that cluster leaders use and focuses on several agreed elements relating to food consumption, nutrition status from a caregiver at the household level. The third tool is a guide for promoters and frontline workers where promoters consolidate information from the cluster leaders with thefront-line worker by tabulating the data coming from the first tool. The data that is collected using CBTT is analysed both at district and community level to show the trends. At community level the promoter in liaison with VNCC and ANCC members use the findings to generate community dialogue sessions where they engage the community members (CLANS, ACLANS, men, women, adolescents, cluster leaders) in a discussion where they look at the results of data for the village. They discuss the causes of the observed trends, find solutions for the identified problems, formulate action plans to address the problems and also strengthen the areas they are doing well. The action plans that the community draws are usually used by cluster leaders, promoters and frontline workers during their visits to the households. They use them to follow up and ensure that households are implementing the agreed actions in the plans. For example, if the percentage of under five children classified as MAM is among indicators that did not perform well for a particular quarter, cluster leaders conduct home visits to encourage care givers on interventions that would help improve nutrition status of children such as providing them skills on food preparation and consumption of nutritious and diversified diets, teaching cluster members various recipes for children’s porridge through community supported cooking. Clusters also provide regular visits to monitor feeding and caring practices among their cluster members as one way of promoting optimal nutrition. Another example, if they agreed that households will start keeping small livestock to use them for home consumption they will monitor whether the livestock have started being kept and also that the household is consuming animal products from the said livestock. In some cases, the household needs to have legumes stored after harvest for home consumption and cluster leaders will verify the same stored foods. To further enhance decision-making based on the data collected through community behaviour tracking, data is shared with the district council to support follow-up, programme iterations and decision-making at the district level.