Perceived Challenges and Solutions to Adopting Healthy Diets Among Women and Children: A Photovoice Study in Urban Ethiopia

Urban Farm DB summary

A Photovoice study in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, had women of reproductive age photograph challenges to healthy diets for themselves and their children under five, then discussed the images in five focus groups (n=31 women) split by lower and higher socioeconomic status, analyzed with hybrid deductive-inductive thematic coding. Financial and physical barriers to accessing healthy food, time constraints and perceived poor food safety were major shared contributors to poor diets; lower-SES women also cited limited nutrition knowledge, inadequate family support and poor home food environments, while higher-SES women cited unhealthy food preferences combined with easy access to and aggressive promotion of unhealthy foods. Proposed solutions included government-level measures (job creation, nutrition education, affordable healthy food, household infrastructure investment, expanded childcare, restrictions on unhealthy-food promotion) and societal-level measures (gender equality, community-based loan schemes, and support for urban agriculture).