Food Security and Nutrition Outcomes of Farmer Field Schools in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
<h3>Background:</h3> Food and nutrition security in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo are threatened by political instability and chronic poverty. The Jenga Jamaa II project, implemented between 2011 and 2016 in South Kivu Province, aimed to improve household food security and child nutritional status using various intervention strategies, including farmer field school (FFS) programs. <h3>Objective:</h3> To characterize the changes in agricultural production techniques, household food security, and child nutritional status associated with participation in FFS programs. <h3>Methods:</h3> We used a community-matched design to select FFS intervention and control households from 3 health zones in which the project was operating. Data on food security (Household Dietary Diversity Score [HDDS] and Household Food Insecurity Access Scale [HFIAS]) and child anthropometry were collected semiannually for 3.5 years in both groups. Additional data on agricultural practices were collected annually in the FFS group only. Focus groups with FFS staff and beneficiaries were conducted in the final project year. Statistical analyses included basic descriptive statistics such as paired <i>t</i> tests and analysis of covariance; regression models using a bootstrap were applied to generate <i>P</i> values and confidence intervals while accounting for differences between groups. <h3>Results:</h3> The study enrolled 388 FFS beneficiaries and their households in the intervention group and 324 non-FFS households in the control group. FFS participants reported increasing the number of different agricultural techniques they used by an average of 2.7 techniques over the project period, from 5.1 in 2013 to 7.9 in 2016 (<i>P</i><.001). The mean HDDS and HFIAS improved more in the FFS group than in the control group (mean difference between intervention and control for HDDS was 0.9 points and for HFIAS was −4.6 points; <i>P</i><.001). However, the prevalence of child stunting (60.2% intervention vs. 58.8% control) and underweight (22.3% intervention vs. 29.8% control) were similar in both groups at endline (<i>P</i>>.05). <h3>Conclusion:</h3> Although FFS participants diversified their agricultural production strategies and experienced improvements in household food security, there was not a positive impact on child nutritional status. In this food-insecure context, improvements in agricultural production alone are unlikely to significantly change child nutritional status—a health outcome with a complex, multilevel causal chain.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it