We are thrilled to launch the Compendium of Nutrition Intervention Coverage Indicators & Questions for Household Surveys today! The Compendium is a technical resource that can help national and subnational stakeholders fill information gaps around who is receiving nutrition interventions through health systems.
Building on a set of indicators proposed in “Measuring the coverage of nutrition interventions along the continuum of care: time to act at scale” by Gillespie et al., the compendium provides indicator definitions and accompanying questions for nutrition interventions across the maternal, newborn, and child health continuum of care. The questions are primarily modeled after global household surveys programs (e.g. Demographic Health Surveys [DHS]; Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys [MICS]), but also reflect recent research on how to improve question validity.
The Compendium aims to facilitate consistently defined and collected indicators – which allows data to be compared across time and contexts. Given that the global nutrition community does not have a core list of indicators and indicator definitions for health sector nutrition interventions, the Compendium is not intended to function as an authoritative guide on what to measure and report. However, the Compendium can be useful to groups implementing standalone nutrition surveys or seeking to incorporate more nutrition indicators into multi-topic surveys.
Over the past four years, DataDENT has collaborated with others to advance the nutrition coverage measurement agenda more broadly by:
- Systematically identifying and documenting common nutrition coverage data needs
- Convening stakeholders around how to strengthen nutrition-related content in large-scale household and facility surveys – and advocating for new nutrition content in the DHS-8 Core Questionnaire and Service Provision Assessment
- Proposing new coverage indicators and household survey questions to measure coverage of infant young child feeding counseling (IYCF) and nutrition sensitive social protection programs
- Providing technical assistance to improve nutrition coverage measurement through national surveys in Nigeria and Burkina Faso and a nutrition coverage measurement framework in India
- Carrying out measurement research including cognitive testing of households survey questions, examining the implications of the seasonality of data collection on child diet quality indicators, and engaging experts to define effective coverage for nutrition.
The Compendium builds from these efforts but, ultimately, we want the Compendium to be shaped by user needs. We hope to update the Compendium in the next two years based on your insights and ongoing measurement research. We welcome your feedback on the Compendium and how you use it! You can provide feedback via the DataDENT contact form or by leaving comments on this blog post.