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Experience in most developing countries has shown that, when a
community is fully involved in the design, implementation, monitoring
and evaluation of nutrition, poverty related or other development
projects, efforts to improve nutrition are likely more effective.
Participatory approaches often meet the perceived needs of the
population in the community and enable processes to be more
sustainable.
Malnutrition is a serious problem in many developing countries.
Particular nutritional deficits are often identified in specific groups
within a community rather than in the population as a whole.
Therefore, interventions to improve nutrition should be targeted to
these groups specifically, but need to address the population on the
level of the entire community.
Participatory methods that facilitate the assessment of the villagers
needs towards a better nutritional situation include:
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Semi-structured interviews.
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Group discussions on specific nutritional subjects.
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Village or transect walks and mapping.
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Problem analysis at community level through matrices and
ranking.
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Institutional analysis through diagramming.
The following publication provides useful conceptual and methodological
information to plan a participatory needs assessment in the
context of nutrition and food security.
Implementing a Nutrition Baseline Survey takes several weeks or
months and requires specific skills to design and apply the questionnaire
as well as to analyse the collected data.
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