Promoting Healthy Behaviors among Egyptian Mothers: A Quasi-Experimental Study of a Health Communication Package Delivered by Community Organizations

Abstract

Decisions made at the household level, for example, to seek antenatal care or breastfeed, can have a direct impact on the health of mothers and newborns. The SMART Community-based Initiatives program in Egypt worked with community development associations to encourage better household decision-making by training community health workers to disseminate information and encourage healthy practices during home visits, group sessions, and community activities with pregnant women, mothers of young children, and their families. A quasi-experimental design was used to evaluate the program, with household surveys conducted before and after the intervention in intervention and comparison areas. Survey questions asked about women’s knowledge and behaviors related to maternal and newborn care and child nutrition and, at the endline, exposure to SMART activities. Exposure to program activities was high in intervention areas of Upper Egypt: 91% of respondents reported receiving home visits and 84% attended group sessions. In Lower Egypt, these figures were 58% and 48%, respectively. Knowledge of danger signs related to pregnancy, delivery, and newborn illness increased significantly more in intervention than comparison areas in both regions (with one exception in Lower Egypt), after controlling for child’s age and woman’s education; this pattern also occurred for two of five behaviors (antenatal care visits and consumption of iron-folate tablets). Findings suggest that there may have been a significant dose-response relationship between exposure to SMART activities and certain knowledge and behavioral indicators, especially in Upper Egypt. The findings demonstrate the ability of civil society organizations with minimal health programming experience to increase knowledge and promote healthy behaviors among pregnant women and new mothers. The SMART approach offers a promising strategy to fill gaps in health education and counseling and strengthen community support for behavior change.

A scoping review of social‐behaviour change techniques applied in complementary feeding interventions

“…Of the remaining, nine occurred in India (Alive & Thrive India, n.d.; Bhandari et al, ; Bhandari et al, ; Dongre, Deshmukh, & Garg, ; Kadiyala, Morgan, Cyriac, Margolies, & Roopnaraine, ; Kilaru, Griffiths, Ganapathy, & Ghosh, ; Palwala et al, ; Singh et al, ; Vazir et al, ) and eight Central/South American or Mexico (Bonvecchio, Pelto, Escalante, & Monterrubio, ; de Oliveira, Giugliani, Santo, & Nunes, ; Iannotti et al, ; Jensen, Frongillo, Leroy, & Blake, ; Leroy et al, ; Monterrosa et al, ; Penny et al, ; Santos et al, ). Five were implemented in China (Guldan et al, ; Li et al, ; Sun et al, ; J. Zhang, Shi, Chen, Wang, & Wang, ; Y. Zhang et al, ); three in Vietnam (Bruyeron et al, ; Dickey et al, ; Nguyen et al, ); two each in Cambodia (Olney, Talukder, Iannotti, Ruel, & Quinn, ; Reinbott et al, ) and Nepal (Cunningham et al, ; Osei et al, ); and one each in Indonesia (S. White et al, ), Pakistan (Zaman, Ashraf, & Martines, ), and Egypt (Brasington et al, ). Target reach ranged from less than 1,000 for smaller scale research and pilot programs to over one million targeted for large‐scale, government‐implemented programs (i.e., Madagascar and India).…”

Overview of community health worker programmes in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Pakistan

“…All three of the programmes reviewed have effected positive change in their respective countries, and have advanced women's engagement in local communities. While not reviewed in this paper, many measurable determinants of health outcomes have been improved through these programmes, such as improved maternal and fetal health outcomes (23)(24)(25)(26), increased reproductive health uptake and education (27)(28)(29), communicable disease control (30,31), and positive impacts on nutrition (32,33). Our goal was to identify strengths and weakness of the CHW programmes in the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region in order to improve them in the future.…”

Monitoring the decomposition of wealth-related inequality in the use of regular antenatal care in Egypt (1995–2014)

“…During the same period, reproductive health promotion campaigns played a significant role in promoting many messages regarding the importance of antenatal care, safe delivery, breastfeeding, immunization and premarital medical examinations. These campaigns were supported by the provision of training courses to media professionals on population and reproductive health issues [11].…”