Reproducibility package for Food Accounting Salience And Dietary Diversity: A Randomized Impact Evaluation Of An Intervention To Track And Improve Young Children Food Consumption In Bihar, India.

We study the impacts of a household level intervention on the feeding behaviors and beliefs of mothers of children aged 6-24 months, and the resulting dietary diversity of these children’s diet. To do so, we evaluate an RCT implemented across six districts in Bihar, India. We find that mothers in the intervention group that received a food tracking wall journal increased attention and automaticity of key behaviors regarding their child’s diets. Additionally, the intervention improves the likelihood of attaining minimum dietary diversity for children in treated households. Children in treated households show no changes in terms of their middle-upper arm circumference, nor we observe differences in terms of food quantities fed to the children. We find that our results are strongly explained by the frontline worker that delivered the intervention to the household. While we find only small change in increasing food diversity five months post-treatment, these changes are limited by the food availability and income of the households. Overall, our results suggest that simple behavior change tools to increase food accounting and salience can support other infant and young child nutrition interventions and can complement home visits and serve as reminders and habit changing for mothers.