Utilization of Information and Communication Technologies for Nutrition Education among Community Health Workers in Imo State, Nigeria

Purpose: Nutrition education through low cost information and communication technologies could improve the quality of health service delivery and build up health workers' capacity especially at the primary health care level. The study examined the utilization of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for nutrition education in Imo state, Nigeria. Methods: Multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select 111 community health workers, out of which 95 were subjected to analysis. Questionnaire was used to collect primary data from community health workers. Data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics at a[subscript 0.05]. Results: The respondents' age was 37.74 ±8.49 years; data obtained indicated that there were more female community health workers (85.3%) than male (14.7%). All the respondents had more than one year of working experience with 29.5% of them having between six to ten years work experience. Respondents had low usage (9.83±6.90) of ICTs for nutrition education, however Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication ranked highest (1.74 ± 0.65) among the available ICTs used. Nutritional knowledge of community health workers was high, and most of them had favorable perception to the use of ICTs. Inadequate instructors ranked as the highest limiting factor to use of ICTs (X[bar] = 1.34). Availability of ICTs was significantly (r = 0.433) related to utilization of ICTs for nutrition education, while there is no significant difference (t = -1.55) in the utilization of ICTs for nutrition education between community health workers that received in-service training and those that did not. Conclusion: Respondents' were favorably disposed to ICTs' use for nutrition education, but its utilization was low.