The Maternal And Child Cash Transfer Intervention Integrated With Nutrition, Early-childhood Development And Agriculture Impact Evaluation (micinea) Trial – Baseline

The MiCINEA trial is aimed at evaluating the cost-effectiveness of using CBCCs and parenting care-groups as platforms to improve maternal diets, and child nutrition and development by providing nutrition-sensitive behaviour change and cash transfer intervention packages in communities already receiving a standard of care Government early childhood development (ECD) SBC program. With our partners, IFPRI, Save the Children, Give Directly and the University of Malawi, we designed a 3-year cluster randomised trial in Balaka and Ntcheu in the Southern Region of Malawi, including 160 communities randomised to one of four treatment arms: 1) Standard of Care (SoC) arm: Receiving the standard Government ECD SBC program; 2) SBC arm: Receiving the SoC intervention with additional nutrition, ECD and agriculture SBC activities to improve nutritious food production, diets and care practices for young children; 3) Low CT arm: SoC plus SBC plus a maternal and child cash transfer ~20US$ per month; and 4) High CT arm: SoC plus SBC plus a maternal and child CT ~35US$ per month. Primary outcomes include the mean probability of adequacy of diets for index women and the Malawi Developmental Assessment Tool (MDAT) z-score in all index children aged in utero to <2y at baseline. Intermediate outcomes along the program impact pathways will also be measured, including child nutrition status and development. The overall sample at baseline was 3200. PALM Consulting Limited (PALMCoL) commented on the design and the tools of the study. We also recruited and trained the enumerators who did the data collection. PAMCoL was also responsible for obtaining ethical approval from the National Committee on Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, and all quality control processes during data collection.