Contribution of the <scp>A</scp>live & <scp>T</scp>hrive–<scp>UNICEF</scp> advocacy efforts to improve infant and young child feeding policies in Southeast Asia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evaluating the impact of advocacy for policy change presents many challenges. Recent advances in the field of evaluation, such as contribution analysis (CA), offer guidance on how to make credible claims regarding such impact. The purposes of this article are (a) to detail the application of CA to assess the contribution of an advocacy initiative to improve infant and young child feeding policies and (b) to present the emergent theory of change and contribution story of how progress was achieved. An evaluation applying developmental evaluation and CA was conducted on the Alive & Thrive (A&T)-UNICEF initiative in seven Southeast Asian countries to document the extent to which policy objectives were achieved and identify key drivers of policy change. A contribution story was developed based on these experiences. The advocacy approach, which involved a four-part process, contributed directly to (a) set the agenda of various actors and (b) create a strategic group; and indirectly to (a) set and maintain the issue on the agenda at all stages of the policy cycle, (b) support the government to carry out a set of critical tasks, and (c) extend commitment. All of this helped to achieve progress towards policy change. External influences were at play. The flexibility of A&T allowed key actors to utilize the positive external influences and address some of the negative ones through developing responsive strategies mitigating their effects. The emerging contribution story supports that A&T-UNICEF initiative contributed to the progress achieved in the participating countries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".