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Article History

Received: 15 June 2020

Accepted: 17 November 2020

First Online: 2 December 2020

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: We received research ethics approval from the Non-Medical Research Ethics Board at McGill University, Canada (REB File #: 503–0518), and at University of Livingstonia in Malawi (UNILIA-REC-4/18). The study also received written consent from Dowa health office authorizing us to conduct research in the clinics under its jurisdiction. Informed oral consent were obtained from all participants before each interview. We obtained oral permission from the research participants based on the recommendations of the local research stakeholders that includes research ethics board in Malawi. The rationale was that a written consent paper could be easily seen by their partners that could potentially put the respondents at risk of IPV. To assure that mothers agreed to participate, they were asked to tick their name on their specific consent forms that were kept by the researcher. The two ethics boards agreed with the arrangement prior to the implementation of the study project. The authors also obtained ethics approval to include children in this project. Informed consent was obtained from mothers for researchers to collect demographic and health data from their children.

: Not applicable. We informed the participants that the study will be published to partially fulfill the requirement for the PhD. With full understanding of the research and its intended purpose, all participants gave full consent for us to publish the findings. All identifying.

: We declare no competing interests.