Promoting Exclusive Breastfeeding in Madagascar: A Streamlined Approach to Expand to Two New Regions

The RFP-2 was awarded to Academy of Educational Development (AED) to carry out a behavior change intervention that was already implemented in other regions of Madagascar, in two new coastal regions, Tulear and Mahajanga. The study was co-funded by the USAID.  

The intervention promoted exclusive breastfeeding in the context of Essential Nutrition Action (ENA) and IMCI (Integrated Management of Childhood Illness) through interpersonal communication, community mobilization and utilization of local mass media. The intervention used the existing governmental health services, NGOs and local women groups to strengthen link between the health staffs and the community. The study included improving the quality of health services to support exclusive breastfeeding at the health facility level and providing practical training sessions of pre-service training given at medical and paramedical training institutions of these two regions. The project came to a successful completion in June 2004.

OCHRC has published a monograph, “Improving Exclusive Breastfeeding at Scale: Lessons from Madagascar” that provides findings of the research teams about the importance of partnership with both governmental and non-governmental agencies, integration with existing health activities and investment in pre-service training for long term sustainability. In addition, a research policy brief, “Successfully Scaling up Exclusive Breastfeeding: Lessons Learned from Madagascar” was also published by OCHRC.

The organizations from the countries that participated to produce the reports are (alphabetically):

Madagascar: Ministry of Health and Family Planning, Government of Madagascar

USA: Academy of Educational Development (AED)