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Article History

Received: 11 December 2024

Accepted: 17 October 2025

First Online: 21 November 2025

Declarations

:

: This study utilized publicly available and de-identified data collected by the IFPRI as part of the SPIR project (2016–2021), which is accessible via the Harvard Dataverse (V1 – IFPRI Dataverse: ). The original data collection received ethical clearance, and all participants provided informed consent prior to their participation in the survey. IFPR obtained approval for the SPIR quantitative evaluation design from its Institutional Review Board (IRB) at baseline, and this approval was updated for the second-round survey. Ethics approval was also granted by the IRB of Hawassa University, which hosts the National Academic Center of Excellence for Human Nutrition. Informed oral consent was obtained from all participants, including the household head, mother/primary caregiver of the indexed child, and the father or spouse/partner of the mother, prior to any measurements or interviews, whether conducted by phone or in person. The entire field team received training in ethical data collection practices before the start of data collection. Before beginning each survey, enumerators provided respondents with a brief explanation of the study, informed them that participation was voluntary, and explained that they could withdraw at any time. Verbal consent was required before proceeding with the interview, and surveys were only completed if the target respondent or the parent/legal guardian of the indexed child provided explicit verbal consent. To protect participants’ confidentiality, personal identifiers such as names and geographic locations were stored in separate data files. Anonymized versions of the datasets, excluding all personal identifiers, were made publicly available [ ]. In addition, we obtained ethical clearance from the College of Natural and Computational Sciences Ethical Committee Review Board (ECRB) at Hawassa University on April 13, 2023, with reference number: CNC-REC 023/2023. This approval was updated on April 12, 2024, with reference number: CNC-REC 033/2024. We accessed anonymized, publicly available datasets from IFPRI and are committed to presenting our study results in an ethical manner. As a result, there is no risk of confidentiality breaches or harm to the participants’ identities or personal well-being.

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare no competing interests.