BOX 1.

Alive & Thrive Bangladesh IYCF programme

Alive & Thrive is a multicountry nutrition initiative to save lives, prevent illness and ensure healthy growth of mothers and children. In Bangladesh, BRAC, a large national non‐governmental organization, delivered standard (non‐intensive) and intensified interpersonal counselling (IPC) and community mobilization (CM) as well as a mass media (MM) campaign (intensive) in 50 rural subdistricts in Bangladesh. For standard nutrition IPC, BRAC frontline health workers (Shasthya Kormi) and community health volunteers (Shasthya Shebika) conducted routine home visits and provided information on IYCF practices. In intensive areas, a new cadre of nutrition‐focused frontline workers (Pushti Kormi), together with the health volunteer, conducted multiple age‐targeted IYCF‐focused counselling visits to households with pregnant women and mothers of children under 2 years of age, coached mothers as they tried out the practices and engaged other family members to support the behaviours. In intensive areas, CM included sensitization of community leaders to IYCF, and community theatre shows focused on IYCF. In non‐intensive areas, CM was less structured and covered general health care topics such as family planning, pregnancy registration and antenatal care and did not include IYCF‐related information. The programme evaluation design consisted of two cross‐sectional household surveys, one at baseline (2010) and 4 years later (2014) in the same communities.