Effect of nutrition education videos on mothers’ knowledge and practices on complementary feeding of children 6-23 months, nairobi city county, kenya.

ABSTRACT

Optimal feeding of infants depend not solely on what they are fed but also how, when, where and by whom. Inappropriate feeding practices can cause negative consequences on the growth, development and a child’s life or survival in future. Data from a number of countries show that there are lots of efforts to improve child nutrition, but still, there are significant gaps in complementary feeding. In slum areas, there is an indication of little success of complementary feeding practices due to limited knowledge and negative attitudes towards the practice. The purpose of conducting this study was to explore the effect of using nutrition education videos on the maternal knowledge, attitudes, and practices on complementary feeding of children 6-23 months of age attending selected Maternal Child Health facilities in Ruaraka Sub-County, Nairobi City County Kenya. The study adopted post intervention Cross-sectional analytical design with control. The study involved an intervention group that watched the short nutrition video clips on complementary feeding and a control group that did not watch the videos from a different locality but shared similar characteristics with the intervention group. The sample size of 80 Mothers from control and 118 mothers from intervention who had children aged 6-23 months participated in this study. A researcher-administered questionnaire was expended to collect data which was afterwards analyzed using SPSS version 21. T-test was wrought to compare dissimilarities in continuous data amongst the two study groups on the sociodemographic characteristics, knowledge, attitudes, and practices on complementary feeding, and percentages were done to test for the effect realized on the study variables. P value of < 0.05 was expended as the standard for statistical significance. Most households (83.6% for the control and 92.4% for the intervention) were headed by males. The mean age of the mothers was 25.3 years (24.8 years for control and 25.9 for intervention group). Most mothers were married (83.8% from control and 89.0% from the intervention group), Christians (95.0% from control and 99.2% from intervention), housewives (67.5% from control and 67.8% from the intervention), and had primary school education (38.0% from the control and 54% from the intervention) as their highest education level. There was significantly higher proportion of mothers in the intervention (100%) than in control (51.3%) who had the correct knowledge on exclusive breastfeeding (P=0.041). Similarly, the most mothers from intervention had good knowledge on age of initiating complementary feeding (100%) while control (96.3%) with P=0.021, feeding children from at least 4 food groups (30.0% for control group and 95.5% for intervention group) with a significant difference in these groups group (P=0.006). There was also a significant difference on knowledge mean scores between the control and intervention (P=0.001). A significant difference was found between intervention and control groups on complementary feeding for children aged 6-23 months (P=0.021) where mother in intervention area had better performance than the control. Mothers who were in the intervention area had better nutrition knowledge, and practices as compared to their counterpart, control group. Nutrition messages in the nutrition videos on Infant and Young Child Feeding Practices were easily understood by the mothers/caregivers as they watched then in the health facilities thus bring about behavior change. The use of videos on nutrition education can be of great significance in reducing knowledge gaps among the mothers and caregivers. The findings can be used by the Ministry of Health and other stakeholders to guide them in targeting during their intervention programs. A similar study in the rural set up is highly recommended for scaling out to communities at risk of poor nutrition indicators.