Interventions to tackle malnutrition and its risk factors in children living in slums: a scoping review

Abstract

Context: Children living in slums are at high risk of being malnourished. There are no published reviews on existing interventions promoting better nutrition for children living in slums and the risk factors for children’s malnutrition. Improved understanding of the risk factors for malnutrition in slums communities and the impact of interventions on children’s health can provide guidance to practitioners and decision-makers. The present review is designed to provide this information.

Methods: The search included 30 electronic bibliographic databases and relevant eligible studies published up to December 2013.

Results: The search located 1512 citations. Full text relevance screening was conducted on 226 studies and on abstracts for 16 studies. The final 58 unique studies included 22 on interventions and 38 on risk. All of the interventions were nutrition-specific, with nutritional intervention being the most dominant type. Seventy-three per cent of the interventions were assessed effective.

Conclusion: The findings stressed the gaps in knowledge in terms of quality assessment and programmatic recommendations to identify children who are the most at risk of malnutrition to appropriately target interventions. Finally, the review helped to inform a systematic review (Cochrane Systematic review protocol 2015) that will examine the impact of interventions on outcome measures.

Keywords:

• Wasting
• under-nutrition
• stunting
• underweight
• informal settlements

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge and extend their gratitude to AXA research fund for providing financial support to this research as Sophie Goudet is a beneficiary of an AXA Research Fund postdoctoral grant. PG’s time was supported by a British Academy mid-career fellowship (Ref: MD120048).

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.