Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Interventions that offer growth monitoring and nutrition counseling services to
families with young children are one of the cornerstones of nutrition policy in
developing countries. By raising caregivers’ awareness and encouraging recommended
feeding, health, and hygiene practices, these programs seek to improve children’s
growth, measured in terms of height and weight. We explore the effects of one such
intervention that conducted home visits and community meetings with mothers of children
under two years old in El Alto, a city of high poverty concentration in Bolivia. Project
eligibility was limited to just over 400 households residing within a strictly defined
geographical area. We exploit the resulting geographical discontinuity to identify
impacts. Three years after the project started, we find that caregivers in the
intervention area show substantial gains in health- and nutrition-related knowledge
(0.327s) and practices (0.273s) relative to their peers just outside the project
boundary. We find no detectable impacts on children’s height, but observe a significant
increase in the prevalence of overweight children. For contexts such as El Alto, with
high prevalence of stunting and increasing risk of overweight in the same population,
these results suggest that nutrition promotion interventions should reassess both
content and behavioral change strategies to reduce stunting while concurrently
preventing excess weight gain in children.
 JEL codes: I15, J13, C93</jats:p>