Context-adapted interventions are needed to alleviate the burden of food and nutrition insecurity on resource-poor rural households in southeastern Madagascar. The Positive Deviance approach implies identifying locally viable development solutions by focusing on particularly successful, innovative individuals. To identify promising practices that could be promoted as part of food and nutrition security (FNS) interventions in the Atsimo Atsinanana region of southeastern Madagascar, positive deviance was searched among smallholder farmers. Positive deviants are defined as households with overall optimal performance across four aspects of FNS: household-level food security, women’s diet quality, child’s diet quality, and low diarrhea incidence. To identify positive deviants, a two-step procedure was followed. Based on quantitative survey data from 413 rural smallholder households (mother-child pairs) with a child aged between 6 and 23 months, each household’s four performance scores were adjusted by removing the average effects of household resources. Then, households with Pareto-optimal performance were identified regarding the four aspects. Subsequently, 16 positive deviants were revisited and positive deviant practices were identified through in-depth interviews. A set of practices were validated through focus group discussions with local nutrition and agriculture experts. Positive deviant practices include the adoption of agricultural innovation, such as new cash crops, as well as nutrition-sensitive market behaviors and reliance on off-farm activities. In addition, some ethno-cultural factors help to explain positive deviance. These diverse positive deviant practices may serve as examples and inspiration for locally grounded development interventions targeting FNS in southeastern Madagascar.
Background Severe food and nutrition insecurity persist in Madagascar. The Atsimo Atsinanana region is among the most affected areas due to elevated poverty rates and low levels of resilience to frequent shocks. Implementing food and nutrition security (FNS) interventions could help to improve this situation, but to be effective and sustainable, intervention packages must fit the local context. Objective To identify locally suitable options, this study assesses the perceptions of local communities in rural Atsimo Atsinanana toward a range of FNS intervention options. Methods We held twelve gender-disaggregated workshops with 80 prospective beneficiaries of an FNS project, from both inland and coastal parts of the region. Preferences were elicited for 14 potential FNS interventions. Next, through participatory ex-ante impact assessment, participants ranked eight impact criteria and individually estimated expected impacts of all intervention options on these criteria. Results Overall, participants preferred interventions targeting on-farm crop, vegetable, and livestock production. Income and food self-sufficiency were ranked as the highest intervention priorities. However, intervention preferences differed by gender and geographical location. While preferences for interventions targeting dietary habits were weak across genders, women had relatively stronger preferences for these interventions than men. This shows that collecting gender-disaggregated preferences can enable more gender-sensitive choice of interventions. Preferences also reflected local livelihoods, as more market-oriented coastal sites showed stronger interest in income generation than more subsistence-oriented inland sites. The ex-ante impact assessments highlight both positive and negative expectations for most interventions, with increased labor burden being the most prominent negative impact overall. Conclusions The findings suggest that participatory, multi-dimensional impact assessments before project implementation can support development stakeholders in tailoring intervention packages, considering (i) local and gendered preferences; and (ii) trade-offs between different development objectives.
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