Social Franchising and a Nationwide Mass Media Campaign Increased the Prevalence of Adequate Complementary Feeding in Vietnam: A Cluster-Randomized Program Evaluation.

Rigorous evaluations of health system-based interventions in large-scale programs to improve complementary feeding (CF) practices are limited. Alive & Thrive applied principles of social franchising within the government health system in Vietnam to improve the quality of interpersonal counseling (IPC) for infant and young child feeding combined with a national mass media (MM) campaign and community mobilization (CM). We evaluated the impact of enhanced IPC + MM + CM (intensive) compared with standard IPC + less-intensive MM and CM (nonintensive) on CF practices and anthropometric indicators.

Infant and young child feeding practices differ by ethnicity of Vietnamese mothers.

Background: Limited studies have examined ethnic variation in breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices in developing countries. This study investigated ethnic variation in feeding practices in mothers with children 0-23 months old in Vietnam.

Methods: We used data on 1875 women who came from the ethnic majority, Kinh (n = 989, randomly sampled from 9875 surveyed Kinh mothers, 10 % from each province) and three ethnic minorities: E De-Mnong (n = 309), Thai-Muong (n = 229) and Tay-Nung (n = 348).