An educational intervention in rural Uganda: Risk-targeted home talks by village health workers

•Home talks increase health knowledge of rural African mothers.•Learners retain knowledge over time.•Lack of literacy does not impede learning core messages. Evaluate the effectiveness of home talks (HTs), a novel model of health education delivered by village health workers (VHWs) with primary-level education to rural African mothers. Talk recipients were assessed by health census to be at risk for ill-health in one of 5 ways: malnutrition, diarrhea, respiratory disease, HIV, and poverty due to family size. Each participant received a pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test on their assigned HT topic and a pre-test and delayed post-test on a randomly assigned control topic. Differences in scoring were examined against controls and over time using paired t-tests and general linear regression analysis, respectively. Subjects lost knowledge gained from the HTs over time, but what they retained at 3 months was far greater than what they learned about the control topics (p-values