Community intervention to improve growth among children under 2 in rural India

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Many children in developing countries die or fail to grow to their full potential because of undernutrition. Forty percent of the world's undernourished children live in India. There is a critical window of opportunity to prevent undernutrition and its long-term consequences by intervening to improve the health of mothers and children between conception and two years of age. For over eight years now, international agencies, scientists and activists have recommended the introduction of a new community worker focused on improving the health and nutrition of mothers in pregnancy and children under 2 in rural areas of India. Currently there is currently is no scientifically tested, cost-effective and scalable intervention model for such a worker. In the proposed research we will test a community intervention implemented by a community worker modeled on the one proposed by the Indian government in order to understand whether it can reduce child undernutrition and how it could be scaled up. The findings from this research will be generalisable to rural areas of India with a high prevalence of undernutrition, which is a population of over 170 million, and have relevance to other low and middle-income country settings.