Utilities for Calculating Infant and Young Child Feeding Indicators

The first 1,000 days of life (from pregnancy to a child’s 2nd birthday) are critical for addressing childhood malnutrition, especially stunting. Infant and young child feeding practices (IYCF) largely overlap with this period as they cover breastfeeding and complementary feeding practices for the first two years of a child’s life. They also have a significant impact on childhood health, nutrition outcomes, and child survival. It is, therefore, critical for countries to measure IYCF practices as part of their efforts to monitor their progress toward Sustainable Development Goal 2. It is also important for development agencies to be able to monitor and evaluate their programs aimed at improving infant and young child feeding practices towards improved overall childhood nutrition.

Details

WHO and UNICEF released the first IYCF indicators definition and measurement guidelines in 2008. In 2021, these guidelines were updated along with a revised standard questionnaire to capture the information required to calculate the updated IYCF indicators since the first initial publication. In general, the IYCF indicators can be categorized into three main categories: (1) breastfeeding indicators, (2) complementary indicators, and (3) other indicators, which are focused on bottle-feeding practices and the generation of data visualization plots for the breastfeeding status by age.

Author

Maintainer: Nicholus Tint Zaw nicholustintzaw@katilingban.io

Authors:

• Ernest Guevarra ernest@guevarra.io (ORCID)

• Rebecca Wolfe