Dial ‘N’ for nutrition? A landscape analysis of what we know about m-nutrition, m-agriculture and m-development

Published by the Institute of Development Studies, UK, in November 2016, this review considers the potential of mobile phone applications (m-) for nutrition, agriculture and development. It aims to assist implementers and evaluators to understand the landscape they are operating in, so they can design nutrition and agriculture interventions that stand the greatest chance of working, and evaluation designs that stand the greatest chance of finding answers.The review summarises what is known about behaviour change in nutrition (Section 2) and reviews evidence on the role of mobile phone technology in nutrition-related behaviour change (Section 3). Sections 4 and 5 repeat this for agriculture. Section 6 surveys the wider mobile technology and m-development landscape. Section 7 draws conclusions for impact assessment of m-nutrition programmes.

Behaviour change is central to the effectiveness of many interventions that aim to address child undernutrition. Promotion of exclusive breastfeeding and good complementary feeding practices are two behaviour change interventions that have been shown to be effective in the efforts to tackle child undernutrition. Agriculture is the sector with the most studies on the effectiveness of nutrition-sensitive interventions. For agriculture to become more nutrition sensitive, choices will need to be made about who controls resources, which crops and animals are farmed, the types of storage and processing patterns adopted, and the metrics used to assess interventions. All of these changes are embedded in long cultural traditions and are not necessarily straightforward to change.

Mobile phone technology has the potential to initiate behaviour change and facilitate the long-term maintenance of new behaviours. A number of m-agri and m-health interventions exist, and m-nutrition interventions are increasingly being developed. The number of high quality studies that look at whether mobile technology interventions help behaviour change is small, but is likely to increase quite rapidly with rising mobile penetration rates and declining costs.