Impact of the eKutir ICT-enabled social enterprise and its distributed micro-entrepreneur strategy on fruit and vegetable consumption: A quasi-experimental study in rural and urban communities in Odisha, India

Tracing the Single and Combined Contributions of Home-Grown Supply and Health Literacy on Fruit and Vegetable Consumption: An Empirical Exploration in Rural India

“…Data were obtained from the baseline survey of an agri-food value chain intervention sponsored by Grand Challenges India (44). The intervention was implemented by eKutir, a social enterprise in the state of Odisha, India, that leverages both information and communication technology (ICT) platform-enabled ecosystem and a micro-entrepreneurial deployment strategy to solve food and nutrition insecurity in low-resource rural communities.…”

“…eKutir provides inputs, technical assistance, market linkages, and daily market pricing information through ICT tools deployed throughout their ecosystem. The evolution of eKutir's ICTenabled ecosystem (55) as well as its impact on FVC for rural farmers and urban consumers (44) have previously been studied.…”

“…Household socio-economic and -demographic characteristics were included as control variables, including area of irrigated land, education level, primary language spoken, social groups, and household food insecurity. The highest level of education completed by the head of household and the area of irrigated land were included as proximal measures for socio-economic status (SES) for this analysis due to the low reliability of self-reported income collected for this study (44). The primary language was classified into one of the four categories: (1) Odia, (2) Sambalpur, (3) Adivashi, and (4) Other.…”

“…Both rural and urban FVC fall lower than that of the recommended intake value. According to a recent study in rural India (44), home-grown consumption can mediate the influence of farm-level interventions targeted at increasing consumption of FVs. However, FVC is the product of a complex interaction of factors, and only limited studies have assessed the independent and interacting influences of agricultural-and knowledge-based drivers on improving FVC, especially in India.…”

Strengthening agriculture-nutrition linkages to improve consumption of nutrient-dense perishable foods in India - existing evidence and way forward

“…These studies mainly assessed the impact of two interventions on consumption of NDPFs with or without other nutrition outcomes: homestead food production (n=6) and usage of information and communication technology (ICT) for agricultural input and market linkages (n=1). Majority of the studies (Table 1) involved a combination of interventions (Birdi and Shah, 2016;Chakravarty, 2000;Dubé et al, 2020;Murty et al, 2016;Murty et al, 2013;Pradhan et al, 2018;Vijayaraghavan et al, 1997). The main strategies included distribution of seeds and saplings of fruits and vegetables (4 studies, 1 study included Vitamin A rich crops exclusively), provision of nutrition education (6 studies, 1 study specifically focussed on Vitamin A), education on green methods of farming (1 study) and introduction of high yield variety of poultry birds (2 studies).…”