Enteric diseases are often caused by poor hygiene and can contribute to stunting. In Bangladesh preparing food, serving food, feeding children, and eating food with bare hands is a common practice, yet most handwashing promotion has focused on fecal contact.

“It’s my responsibility to make sure that my son grows up intelligent and healthy,”says Sabina Yasmin, a 21-year-old mother from a rural village in Bochaganj sub-district in northern Bangladesh.

Household food insecurity (HFI) is a recognized underlying determinant of child undernutrition, but evidence of associations between HFI and child undernutrition is mixed.

Mapping pathways of how interventions are implemented and utilized enables contextually grounded interpretation of results, differentiates poor design from poor implementation, and identifies factors that might influence the utilization of interventions.

A comprehensive set of infant and young child feeding (IYCF) indicators for international use was published in 2008. Alive & Thrive (A&T) undertook a process to incorporate these indicators into Viet Nam’s National Nutrition Surveillance System (NNSS).

This article was part of a special supplement in the Journal of Nutrition on the Alive & Thrive (A&T) project. Improving and sustaining infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices requires multiple interventions reaching diverse target groups over a sustained period of time.