Transparency and New Technology to Reduce Childhood Malnutrition in India

WHO reports that hunger and related micronutrient deficiencies continue to be the greatest threat to global public health and the biggest contributor to child mortality. Delivery, adoption, and use of health services and technologies such as micronutrient supplementation in low-income countries often fail due to critical incentives and disincentives embedded in institutions and communities that are not observable from the outside. As a step towards addressing these challenges, we have created an initiative at Stanford to identify institutional and behavioral obstacles that prevent health programs in India from succeeding. These insights are also critical for focusing rigorous academic research on the on-the-ground bottlenecks that cause health delivery efforts to fail. Informed by this perspective, the research team will design and test interventions to improve the performance of nutrition programs in Tamil Nadu, India.