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Combating Child Malnutrition in Post-Conflict Zones : Assessing an Intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has the highest percentage of undernourished people in Sub-Saharan Africa, at 75% in 2006. This abstract presents results from our 2014 study of a nutritional therapy treatment to combat moderate and severe forms of malnutrition in the town of Butembo in the North Kivu region of DRC. The treatment has been offered by Georgio Cerruto Therapeutic Nutrition Center at the Université Catholique du Graben in Butembo since 2002. We attempted to evaluate this treatment using a post-treatment design using a comparison group from a rural area outside of Butembo. Our data offers a rare insight into the prevalence and intensity of child malnutrition and assesses the impact of a treatment. We propose to use this study as a basis for a more formal study using (i) randomization, and (ii) infield longer-term study design. Our main goal is to construct an effective medical supply chain to address this problem long-term not just in the DRC but elsewhere in Africa. 1 This abstract is based on a capstone project I supervised and conducted with my final year students at the Bush School of Government, Texas A&M University (where I was a professor before coming to UT, Austin). My team comprised of Sky Barlow, Zike Chen, Gavin Finnegan, Dr. Blaise Pascal Furaha (from DRC), Brandon Pichanik, Cait Stadler and Julie Swensen. A working paper from which many parts are abstracted here is available. It has not yet been submitted for publication but that is planned.