Enhancing milk consumption among Girinka beneficiaries: Impact of Gabura Amata Mubyeyi social behavior change communication intervention

Animal source foods (ASFs), including cow’s milk, contain essential nutrients and contribute to a healthy diet, but frequency of intake is low among children in low- and middle-income countries. We hypothesized that an ASF social behavior change communication (SBCC) intervention implemented by community health workers (CHWs) during monthly home visits and community-level activities would increase child milk consumption and dietary diversity through the ‘own-production’ pathway in households that received a cow from the Government of Rwanda’s Girinka livestock transfer program. The Girinka or One Cow per Poor Family program is a presidential initiative started in 2006 to provide an exotic or cross-bred dairy cow to households with low socioeconomic status that do not already own cattle. We tested the 9-month SBCC intervention (known as Gabura Amata Mubyeyi) in a cohort of children aged 12-29 months at baseline in administrative cells randomly assigned to the intervention or control. Our main outcomes were child milk consumption (24-hour recall), frequency of milk consumption (7-day recall), and minimum dietary diversity. This dataset includes the data used for an analysis of the impact of the SBCC intervention among Girinka beneficiaries (GNE group = Girinka + SBCC; CNE group = Girinka only). It also include a third study group (NNE group = eligible for Girinka, but has not yet received a cow). In a separate analysis, we compared the two Girinka groups at baseline to the No cow group using propensity score matching to measure the impact of the Girinka program itself on child nutrition outcomes. Our outcomes for this secondary analysis were child anthropometry, child milk consumption (24-hour recall), frequency of milk consumption (7-day recall), minimum dietary diversity, and household food insecurity.