Giordano Palloni

Feasibility of using an artificial intelligence-based telephone application for dietary assessment and nudging to improve the quality of food choices of female adolescents in Vietnam: Evidence from a randomized pilot study

Background Adolescent nutrition has faced a policy neglect, partly owing to the gaps in dietary intake data for this age group. The Food Recognition Assistance and Nudging Insights (FRANI) is a smartphone application validated for dietary assessment and to influence users toward healthy food choices. Objectives This study aimed to assess the feasibility (adherence, acceptability, and usability) of FRANI and its effects on food choices and diet quality in female adolescents in Vietnam. Methods Adolescents (N = 36) were randomly selected from a public school and allocated into 2 groups. The control group received smartphones with a version of FRANI limited to dietary assessment, whereas the intervention received smartphones with gamified FRANI. After the first 4 wk, both groups used gamified FRANI for further 2 wk. The primary outcome was the feasibility of using FRANI as measured by adherence (the proportion of completed food records), acceptability and usability (the proportion of participants who considered FRANI acceptable and usable according to answers of a Likert questionnaire). Secondary outcomes included the percentage of meals recorded, the Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDDW) and the Eat-Lancet Diet Score (ELDS). Dietary diversity is important for dietary quality, and sustainable healthy diets are important to reduce carbon emissions. Poisson regression models were used to estimate the effect of gamified FRANI on the MDDW and ELDS. Results Adherence to the application was 82% and the percentage of meals recorded was 97%. Acceptability and usability were 97%. MDDW in the intervention group was 1.07 points (95% CI: 0.98, 1.18; P = 0.13) greater than that in the control (constant = 4.68); however, the difference was not statistically significant. Moreover, ELDS in the intervention was 1.09 (95% CI: 1.01, 1.18; P = 0.03) points greater than in the control (constant = 3.67). Conclusions FRANI was feasible and may be effective to influence users toward healthy food choices. Research is needed for FRANI in different contexts and at scale.

Can agricultural development projects empower women? A synthesis of mixed methods evaluations using pro-WEAI in the gender, agriculture, and assets project (phase 2) portfolio

Agricultural development projects increasingly include women’s empowerment and gender equality among their objectives, but efforts to evaluate their impact have been stymied by the lack of comparable measures. Moreover, the context-specificity of empowerment implies that a quantitative measure alone will be inadequate to capture the nuances of the empowerment process. The Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, Phase 2 (GAAP2), a portfolio of 13 agricultural development projects in nine countries in South Asia and Africa, developed the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and qualitative protocols for impact evaluations. Pro-WEAI covers three major types of agencies: instrumental, intrinsic, and collective. This paper synthesizes the results of 11 mixed-methods evaluations to assess these projects’ empowerment impacts. The projects implemented the pro-WEAI and its associated qualitative protocols in their impact evaluations. Our synthesis finds mixed, and mostly null impacts on aggregate indicators of women’s empowerment, with positive impacts more likely in the South Asian, rather than African, cases. There were more significant impacts on instrumental agency indicators and collective agency indicators, reflecting the group-based approaches used. We found few significant impacts on intrinsic agency indicators, except for those projects that intentionally addressed gender norms. Quantitative analysis does not show an association between the types of strategies that projects implemented and their impacts, except for capacity building strategies. This finding reveals the limitations of quantitative analysis, given the small number of projects involved. The qualitative studies provide more nuance and insight: some base level of empowerment and forms of agency may be necessary for women to participate in project activities, to benefit or further increase their empowerment. Our results highlight the need for projects to focus specifically on empowerment, rather than assume that projects aiming to reach and benefit women automatically empower them. Our study also shows the value of both a common metric to compare empowerment impacts across projects and contexts and qualitative work to understand and contextualize these impacts.

Paying for digital information: Assessing farmers’ willingness to pay for a digital agriculture and nutrition service in Ghana