Browsing by Author "Manohar, Swetha"

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    Recovery without resilience? A novel way to measure nutritional resilience in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Uganda
    (Global Food Security, 2021) Bashaasha, Bernard; Zaharia, Sonia; Masters, William A.; Ghosh, Shibani; Shively, Gerald E.; Gurung, Sabi; Manohar, Swetha; Thorne-Lyman, Andrew L.; Kabunga, Nassul; Webb, Patrick
    People in fragile environments face various shocks that negatively affect their nutrition. Many governments put policy mechanisms in place to promote recovery of households after adverse shocks; however, resilience is difficult to measure because some apparent recovery could be the result of statistical randomness and reversion to trends. This paper demonstrates a new approach to measuring nutritional resilience in a population. As our starting point, we use the common definition of resilience as ‘recovery after decline’, but also require that the degree of recovery should exceed stochastic expectations. Using maternal and child nutrition data from Nepal, Bangladesh, and Uganda, we find that observed recovery is not always statistically significant and does not always satisfy this definition of resilience. We identify household and community factors that are correlated with measurable nutritional resilience, and recommend points of entry for policies designed to enhance resilience in resource-constrained settings.
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    Young Children Who Eat Animal Sourced Foods Grow Less Stunted: Findings of Contemporaneous and Lagged Analyses from Nepal, Uganda and Bangladesh
    (Research Square, 2020) Zaharia, Sonia; Ghosh, Shibani; Shrestha, Robin; Manohar, Swetha; Thorne-Lyman, Andrew; Bashaasha, Bernard; Kabunga, Nassul; Gurung, Sabi; Namirembe, Grace; Heneveld, Katherine; Liang, Lichen; Webb, Patrick
    In resource constrained countries, animal-sourced foods (ASFs) are an important nutrient-dense source of vitamins, minerals and macronutrients. While several studies have suggested the value of ASFs to child growth, most empirical evidence is based on cross-sectional data which can only provide information about the contemporaneous relationship between diet and anthropometric outcomes. This study uses longitudinal panel data for Nepal, Bangladesh, and Uganda to assess the association between contemporaneous as well as past ASF consumption and linear growth of children aged 6-24 months. Fixed effects models found that ASF consumption was significantly correlated with lower stunting, with a decline in stunting prevalence as high as 10% in Nepali children who had consumed any ASF in the previous year. Consuming two or more ASFs showed an even higher magnitude of association, ranging from a 10% decline in prevalence of stunting associated with lagged consumption in Bangladesh to a 16% decline in Nepal.