On 6th May 2015, work was completed on characterising the baseline for the “Community education interventions in nutrition, WASH/malaria and anemia” study that seeks to evaluate the long term effectiveness of such practices in reducing malnutrition, micro-nutrient deficiencies and anemia in children aged under five.

The etiological nature of anemia and malnutrition proves complex and multifaceted but interlinked by shared etiological agents and hence this stage also enables the determination of the incidence of anemia and malnutrition as well as characterising their etiologic profiles, essential for planning not only the forecast interventions but also identifying their respective beneficiaries.

In this study phase, 1,106 households, with their residences in seven neighbourhoods with operational health centres falling within the CISA study area, were invited to participate and of which only 798 turned up in order to have their demographic, socioeconomic, nutritional, anthropometric, parasitological, biochemical and molecular data collected with a total of 949 children aged under three belonging to these household. In total, 798 malaria preventing mosquito nets got distributed with 39 children sent on for treatment at Bengo General Hospital for acute malnourishment and two for severe anemia.

The data set collected is now undergoing thorough statistical analysis to determine the prevalence of anemia, malnutrition and their respective etiological agents in addition to ascertaining any associations and investigating any causal relationships among these variables.