Poster Child for Healthy Growth

Poster Child for Healthy Growth

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Key Findings:

  • Simple growth charts, which allowed parents to see if their child had a normal height for their age, did not reduce reduce growth deficits on average among the 547 children in the study, but among malnourished children, reduced stunting by 22 percentage points.
  • In contrast, inviting caregivers to quarterly meetings to learn if their children had a normal height and weight and providing food supplements to malnourished children had no impact on rates of stunting.
  • Neither home-based growth charts nor community-based monitoring were found to impact children’s cognitive development.
  • Home-based growth charts appear to be a cost-effective tool to reduce physical growth deficits in this context. For every dollar that was invested in growth charts, children who otherwise would have been stunted gained an estimated $16 in additional lifetime wages. 
July 10, 2018