More Than the Sum of Its Parts ? The Roles of Knowledge and Income in Improving Infant and Young Child Feeding in Ethiopia : A Field Experiment ∗

In many parts of the developing world, pre-school children consume diets of limited diversity, increasing their risk of chronic undernutrition. These monotonous diets are a consequence of many factors, including poor maternal knowledge of good diets, limited resources, or both. In this paper, we develop a simple conceptual model that shows how child diets and child anthropometric status change when these constraints are relaxed. We then apply this model to data taken from a clustered randomized trial we designed and implemented in Ethiopia. Our treatment arms include an intervention to improve maternal knowledge (Behavior Change Communication, BCC), the provision of vouchers to address the income constraint, and a treatment arm where both are provided. We show that BCC improves maternal knowledge of nutrition and child-feeding behaviors, while food vouchers alone do not. Impacts are largest when both constraints are addressed through both BCC and vouchers. Only in this group do we see these treatments reducing chronic undernutrition. ∗We wish to thank John Hoddinott, David Just, Kyoungwoo Lee, Chulyoung Kim, as well as seminar participants at Cornell University for their invaluable feedback. We also thank Jieun Kim, Yong Hyun Nam, Minah Kim, Hyolim Kang, Jiwon Baek, Tembi Williams, Soo Sun You, and Jeong Hyun Oh at Africa Future Foundation (AFF) for their excellent fieldwork, and Rahel Getachew, Chulsoo Kim, Hongryang Moon at Myungsung Christian Medical Center and director Hyun Jin Song for their support. This project was funded by AFF, Korea Foundation for International Healthcare (KOFIH), Seoul Women’s Hospital Bucheon Branch, and Dr. Taehoon Kim. All views expressed are ours, and all errors are our own. The study was approved by ethical review committees at the Oromia Health Bureau (Ethiopia, BEIO/AHBHN/1-8/2670), Myungsung Medical College (Ethiopia), and Cornell University (USA, 1612006823). †Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University ‡Division of Nutritional Sciences, Cornell University §Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University