Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the relationship between worsening child nutrition and a hygiene-related disorder—environmental enteropathy—for rural Zimbabwean households and examines the extent to which simple technologies and changes in understanding and practices may potentially improve nutritional status.

Paper long abstract:

Global development practitioners long believed the key to improving nutritional status in Africa lay in boosting food security through food aid or interventions centred on green revolution-type technologies. Since 1982, the author has directed a panel study covering beneficiaries of a land reform program in Zimbabwe intended broadly to enhance rural welfare. Anthropometric assessments of the nutritional well-being of over 12,000 children have revealed an unexpected finding: the nutritional status of children declined by an average of 1.4 percent annually, i.e. children whose families benefited from land reform had nutritional levels two decades later that were worse by 25 percent than when land reform began. These declines mirror secular worsening elsewhere in Zimbabwe and occurred despite generally rising incomes and farm productivity. This lack of association has led to alternative medical explanations for chronically poor nutritional outcomes and resulted in proposed therapeutic interventions that include infant feeding practices, improved water supplies and public health and sanitation/hygiene programs.

The paper explores the relationship between worsening child nutrition and a hygiene-related disorder—known as environmental enteropathy—among rural Zimbabwean households. It questions the extent to which individually proposed therapeutic interventions may result in sustained behavioural changes through creative adaptation and thus positively to shape nutritional outcomes. The paper explores the reasons for the decline by identifying correlates between children's nutritional status and the setting of rural households and concludes with a discussion of local child-rearing practices and the role of relatively simple technologies and changes in understanding to improve nutritional status.