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Policy content and stakeholder network analysis for infant and young child feeding in Bangladesh
BACKGROUND: Appropriate infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices are essential for nutrition of infants and young children. Bangladesh has one of the highest levels of malnutrition globally along with sub-optimal IYCF practices. A supportive policy environment is essential to ensure that effe...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5496023/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28675137 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4338-0 |
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author | Rasheed, Sabrina Roy, Swapan Kumar Das, Susmita Chowdhury, Syeda Nafisa Iqbal, Mohammad Akter, Syeda Mahsina Jahan, Khurshid Uddin, Shahadat Thow, Anne Marie |
author_facet | Rasheed, Sabrina Roy, Swapan Kumar Das, Susmita Chowdhury, Syeda Nafisa Iqbal, Mohammad Akter, Syeda Mahsina Jahan, Khurshid Uddin, Shahadat Thow, Anne Marie |
author_sort | Rasheed, Sabrina |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Appropriate infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices are essential for nutrition of infants and young children. Bangladesh has one of the highest levels of malnutrition globally along with sub-optimal IYCF practices. A supportive policy environment is essential to ensure that effective IYCF interventions are scaled up. The objectives of our study were to assess the support for IYCF in the national policy environment through policy analysis and stakeholder analysis and in so doing identify opportunities to strengthen the policy environment. METHODS: We used a matrix developed by SAIFRN (the South Asian Infant Feeding Research Network) to systematically identify supportive national policies, plans and guidelines for IYCF. We adapted narrative synthesis and descriptive approaches to analyze policy content, based on four themes with a focus on support for mothers. We conducted three Net-Map interviews to identify stakeholders who influenced the policies and programs related to IYCF. RESULTS: We identified 19 national policy documents relevant to IYCF. Overall, there was good level of support for IYCF practices at policy level – particularly regarding general support for IYCF and provision of information to mothers – but these were not consistently supported at implementation level, particularly regarding specificity and population coverage. We identified gaps regarding the training of health workers, capacity building, the monitoring and targeting of vulnerable mothers and providing an enabling environment to mothers, specifically with respect to maternity leave for working women. Urban populations and providers outside the public sector remained uncovered by policy. Our stakeholder analysis identified government entities such as the National Nutrition Service, as the most influential in terms of both technical and funding support as they had the mandate for formulation and implementation of policies and national programs. Stakeholders from different sectors played important roles, demonstrating the salience of IYCF. CONCLUSIONS: Although there is strong supportive policy environment for IYCF, it is important that policies cover all populations. Our analysis indicated that opportunities to strengthen the policy environment include: expanding population coverage, increasing inter-sector coordination, improving translation of policy objectives to implementation-level documents, and the engagement of non-public sectors. In addition, we recommend explicit strategies to engage diverse stakeholders in the formulation and implementation of IYCF policies. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12889-017-4338-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5496023 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-54960232017-07-05 Policy content and stakeholder network analysis for infant and young child feeding in Bangladesh Rasheed, Sabrina Roy, Swapan Kumar Das, Susmita Chowdhury, Syeda Nafisa Iqbal, Mohammad Akter, Syeda Mahsina Jahan, Khurshid Uddin, Shahadat Thow, Anne Marie BMC Public Health Research BACKGROUND: Appropriate infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices are essential for nutrition of infants and young children. Bangladesh has one of the highest levels of malnutrition globally along with sub-optimal IYCF practices. A supportive policy environment is essential to ensure that effective IYCF interventions are scaled up. The objectives of our study were to assess the support for IYCF in the national policy environment through policy analysis and stakeholder analysis and in so doing identify opportunities to strengthen the policy environment. METHODS: We used a matrix developed by SAIFRN (the South Asian Infant Feeding Research Network) to systematically identify supportive national policies, plans and guidelines for IYCF. We adapted narrative synthesis and descriptive approaches to analyze policy content, based on four themes with a focus on support for mothers. We conducted three Net-Map interviews to identify stakeholders who influenced the policies and programs related to IYCF. RESULTS: We identified 19 national policy documents relevant to IYCF. Overall, there was good level of support for IYCF practices at policy level – particularly regarding general support for IYCF and provision of information to mothers – but these were not consistently supported at implementation level, particularly regarding specificity and population coverage. We identified gaps regarding the training of health workers, capacity building, the monitoring and targeting of vulnerable mothers and providing an enabling environment to mothers, specifically with respect to maternity leave for working women. Urban populations and providers outside the public sector remained uncovered by policy. Our stakeholder analysis identified government entities such as the National Nutrition Service, as the most influential in terms of both technical and funding support as they had the mandate for formulation and implementation of policies and national programs. Stakeholders from different sectors played important roles, demonstrating the salience of IYCF. CONCLUSIONS: Although there is strong supportive policy environment for IYCF, it is important that policies cover all populations. Our analysis indicated that opportunities to strengthen the policy environment include: expanding population coverage, increasing inter-sector coordination, improving translation of policy objectives to implementation-level documents, and the engagement of non-public sectors. In addition, we recommend explicit strategies to engage diverse stakeholders in the formulation and implementation of IYCF policies. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12889-017-4338-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2017-06-13 /pmc/articles/PMC5496023/ /pubmed/28675137 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4338-0 Text en © The Author(s). 2017 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Rasheed, Sabrina Roy, Swapan Kumar Das, Susmita Chowdhury, Syeda Nafisa Iqbal, Mohammad Akter, Syeda Mahsina Jahan, Khurshid Uddin, Shahadat Thow, Anne Marie Policy content and stakeholder network analysis for infant and young child feeding in Bangladesh |
title | Policy content and stakeholder network analysis for infant and young child feeding in Bangladesh |
title_full | Policy content and stakeholder network analysis for infant and young child feeding in Bangladesh |
title_fullStr | Policy content and stakeholder network analysis for infant and young child feeding in Bangladesh |
title_full_unstemmed | Policy content and stakeholder network analysis for infant and young child feeding in Bangladesh |
title_short | Policy content and stakeholder network analysis for infant and young child feeding in Bangladesh |
title_sort | policy content and stakeholder network analysis for infant and young child feeding in bangladesh |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5496023/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28675137 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4338-0 |
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