Assessment of a nutrition education program designed to enhance mothers’ attitudes on infants and young children feeding in sudan

AIM: The objective of the study was to assess the effect of a designed nutrition education program (NEP) on maternal attitudes. METHODS: A control two groups, quasi-experimental and pre-and post-experimental, were adopted. Data were collected through personal interviews of two groups using a validated questionnaire. The NEP was conducted in three phases. Phase 1 was the pre-evaluation, Phase 2 was the program’s implementation, and Phase 3 entailed post-evaluation of the program. RESULTS: The results supported the efficient role of the NEP intervention in raising mothers’ attitudes toward nutritional care of under 2 years in Sennar Locality, Sudan. There was no significant difference between the two groups with respect to the controlled variables; mother age, mother education, mother occupation, husband occupation, number of children less than 5 years, family size, and child’s age, which indicate that the two groups were homogenous, that is, no significant difference between mothers’ attitude of the two groups before applying the NEP. The results showed the effectiveness of the NEP in developing experimental group mother’s attitudes, comparing post-test with pre-test in favor of post-test to be statistically significant. NEP has a huge impact in developing the mother’s awareness post-test, measuring and developing the mother’s attitudes compared to post-test with pre-test. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: The nutrition education intervention demonstrated its effectiveness in maternal attitude. The study provided valuable baseline information to develop appropriate training courses and NEP to raise maternal awareness and attitudes toward infants and young children’s nutrition