Impact evaluation of child nutrition programmes

This article presents a review of current practices and recent developments regarding impact evaluation of nutrition programmes for preschool children in developing countries. Nutrition education, food supplementation and nutrition rehabilitation, the three major components of intervention in child nutrition, generally focus on food consumption and are directed at individual cases. Impact evaluations are generally confronted with situations where different programmes operate in a variety of cultural settings, where the effects of the interventions are generally small, and where methodological difficulties usually weaken the evaluations. Both the interventions and evaluations have to operate under restricting conditions, and different strategies to accommodate this situation are mentioned. It is argued that the contribution of evaluation is not so much in the nature of being a final arbiter, but rather in the nature of helping to seek the optimal combination of local conditions and type of assistance offered.