Background: Addressing the nutritional needs of adolescents could be an important step towards breaking the vicious cycle of intergenerational malnutrition. Objective: Assess nutritional status of rural adolescent girls. Design: Cross-sectional. Methods: Anthropometric and socio-demographic information from 211 adolescent girls representing 650 randomly selected households from thirteen communities in Tigray was used in data analysis. Height-for-age and BMI-for-age were compared to the 2007 WHO growth reference. Data were analyzed using SAS, Version 9.1. Results: None of the households reported access to adolescent micronutrient supplementation. The girls were shorter and thinner than the 2007 WHO reference population. The cross-sectional prevalence of stunting and thinness were 26.5% and 58.3%, respectively. Lack of latrine facilities was significantly associated with stunting (p = 0.0033) and thinness (p<0.0001). Age was strong predictor of stunting (r 2 = 0.8838, p<0.0001) and thinness (r 2 = 0.3324, p<0.0001). Conclusion: Undernutrition was prevalent among the girls. Strategies to improve the nutritional status of girls need to go beyond the conventional maternal and child health care programs to reach girls before conception to break the intergenerational cycle of malnutrition. Further, carefully designed longitudinal studies are needed to identify the reasons for poor growth throughout the period of adolescence in this population. IntroductionAdolescence is an intense anabolic period when requirements for all nutrients increase. During adolescence, 20% of final adult height and 50% of adult weight are attained, bone mass increases of 45% and dramatic bone remodeling occur and soft tissues, organs, and even red blood cell mass increase in size (1). This situation is further complicated when adolescents are often exposed to infections and parasites that can compromise nutritional status. Among those sexually active, there is also an increased risk of infection from sexually transmitted diseases.

RESEARCH IWMI R E P O R T I n t e r n a t i o n a l Water Management I n s t i t u t e Research ReportsThe publications in this series cover a wide range of subjects-from computer modeling to experience with water user associations-and vary in content from directly applicable research to more basic studies, on which applied work ultimately depends. Some research reports are narrowly focused, analytical and detailed empirical studies; others are wide-ranging and synthetic overviews of generic problems.Although most of the reports are published by IWMI staff and their collaborators, we welcome contributions from others. Each report is reviewed internally by IWMI's own staff and Fellows, and by external reviewers. The reports are published and distributed both in hard copy and electronically (www.iwmi.org) and where possible all data and analyses will be available as separate downloadable files. Reports may be copied freely and cited with due acknowledgment. About IWMIIWMI's mission is to improve the management of land and water resources for food, livelihoods and the environment. In serving this mission, IWMI concentrates on the integration of policies, technologies and management systems to achieve workable solutions to real problems-practical, relevant results in the field of irrigation and water and land resources.

No abstract

Objective: Estimate levels of and identify factors contributing to child malnutrition in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia. Design: Cross-sectional survey. Setting: Rural communities from four zones of Tigray. Subjects: Three hundred and eighteen under five children representing 587 randomly selected households were included. Results: Among the children surveyed, 46.9%, 33.0% and 11.6% were stunted, underweight and wasted, respectively. Older children were more likely to be undernourished. Stunting increases from 16% in the second half of the first year to 53% in children 24 months and older. Similarly, underweight increases from 10% in the first six months to 36.5% in children aged 24 months and older. A very high proportion of the mothers (80%) initiated feeding of newborns with pre-lacteal feeds primarily butter or water. Family foods and cereal-based porridge were the main complementary foods after six months. Child age, maternal anthropometric characteristics, inadequate complementary foods, the use of prelacteal feeds and area of residence were the main contributing factors to child undernutrition. Conclusion: Undernutrition gets worse as the children grow older. The energy and nutrient density of the complementary foods are low as the foods were prepared from a limited number of local staple cereals without the addition of sugar, fat/oil or animal products. More importantly, these foods are diluted with water to reduce their viscosity. This makes the quality and quantity of the foods insufficient to prevent stunting and underweight. Promotion of traditional household technologies such as germination and fermentation may be affordable measures to improve the quality of the complementary foods. Thus, sustained nutrition education programmes focusing on appropriate complementary feeding practices are recommended.

Agriculture is the mainstay of Ethiopia's economy, contributing more than 40% to GDP and providing a livelihood to about 80% of the population. Agriculture is dominated by smallholders growing predominantly rainfed cereals, making economic performance dependent on rainfall availability. This study used the stochastic frontier production function to analyse the productivity and technical efficiency of 4 different agricultural production systems in Ethiopia; namely, irrigated seasonal farms on traditional irrigation systems, irrigated seasonal farms on modern communal irrigation systems, rainfed seasonal farms for farmers who have access to irrigation and rainfed seasonal farms for farmers who do not have access to irrigation. Simple random samples of farmers were selected from lists of farmers. The sample of farmers constituted 122 from the traditional irrigated sites, 281 from the modern communal irrigated sites and 350 from the control rainfed sites of farmers without access to irrigation. For those farmers, from both traditional and modern communal irrigation, who also had access to rainfed farms, their rainfed farms were included in the sample of rainfed with access to irrigation. This sample constituted 434 farmers. The marginal productivity of land on modern communal irrigation systems shows that this is the smallholder irrigation option that should be developed by the Government of Ethiopia. However, the marginal productivity of land in the 'rainfed without access to irrigation' category is higher than that of the traditional irrigated system. Thus additional developed land should be put under 'rainfed without access to irrigation' before it is put under traditional irrigation; otherwise it should be developed into modern communal irrigation. The average technical efficiency for the modern irrigated system was estimated to be about 71%, whereas this was estimated to be 78% for the 'rainfed without access to irrigation' system. There are potential gains to be realised in improving efficiency in these two systems.

West and East Africa experience high variability of rainfall that is expected to increase with climate change. This results in fluctuations in water availability for food production and other socioeconomic activities. Water harvesting and storage can mitigate the adverse effects of rainfall variability. But past studies have shown that when investments in water storage are not guided by environmental health considerations, the increased availability of open water surface may increase the transmission of waterrelated diseases. This is demonstrated for schistosomiasis associated with small reservoirs in Burkina Faso, and for malaria in Ethiopia around large dams, small dams, and water harvesting ponds. The concern is that the rush to develop water harvesting and storage for climate change adaptation may increase the risk for already vulnerable people, in some cases more than canceling out the benefits of greater water availability. Taking health issues into account in a participatory approach to planning, design, and management of rainwater harvesting and water storage, as well as considering the full range of water storage options would enable better opportunities for enhancing resilience against climate change in vulnerable populations in sub-Saharan Africa.

Land degradation poses a serious problem for the livelihoods of rural producers. Furthermore, there is rarely enough private investment taking place to commensurate the scale of the problem. This article examines the role of tenure insecurity, resource poverty, risk and time preferences, and community-led land conservation on differentiated patterns of household investment in land conservation in northern Ethiopia. We control for biophysical, household characteristics, market access conditions, and village level factors. Investments in soil bunds and stone terraces are specifically studied so as to capture the link between these various factors and the durability of conservation investments. We introduce the distinction between the determinants of the decision to invest and how much to invest in conservation. Regression results show that publicly led conservation programs seem to significantly stimulate private investment. A host of plot-level variables and household perceptions of returns on conservation investments, expressed in terms of perceived improvements in land quality and increased crop yields, were found to be critical to the decision to invest and intensify soil conservation. The evidence on the significance of households' attitudes toward risk aversion suggests the important role of risk and the household's risk-bearing capacity in the decision to intensify conservation measures. At the same time, tenure security indicators and households' resource endowments (resource poverty) had weaker effects in increasing willingness to invest and the level of investment made. The policy implications of these results point to the importance of agricultural research and extension efforts that target technologies which reduce household risk and poverty while enabling sustainable investments in conservation measures by individual households. Copyright 2006 International Association of Agricultural Economics.

The main focus of this article is to explore whether access to selected agricultural water management (AWM) technologies has led to significant reduction in poverty and, if they did so, to identify which technologies had higher impacts. In measuring impact we estimated the average treatment effect for the treated on crop income and measured the differences in consumption expenditures per adult equivalent of those with access and without access using matched data. The estimated average treatment effect was significant and amounted to USD 82 per season. Moreover, there was 24 less poverty incidence among users of AWM technologies compared to nonusers. All technologies were found to have significant poverty reducing impacts with micro dams, deep wells, river diversions, and ponds leading to 37%, 26%, 11%, and 9% reduction in poverty incidence compared to rainfed system. Finally, our study identified the most important correlates of poverty on the basis this we made the policy recommendations to build assets (AWM technologies, livestock, etc); to enhance human resource development and improve the functioning of labor markets for enhanced impact of AWM technologies on poverty