Supporting community health workers in South Africa for context-specific food and nutrition literacy: implementation of a multi-media education-entertainment intervention.

Background: Multimedia technology, recognized for its efficacy in education, offers a complementary approach to traditional health education. In South Africa, community health workers (CHWs) play a pivotal role in improving population health, but often lack comprehensive health knowledge. This study explores the effectiveness of using a multimedia education-entertainment (MM-EE) intervention to enhance food and nutrition literacy among CHWs in resource-challenged townships.

Methods: Seventy-seven participants completed a baseline and 6-month post-intervention follow-up survey. The MM-EE intervention comprised short stories conveyed via comic booklets and 30-second video clips, covering food knowledge, use of food labels, meal preparation, planning, and eating behaviour. Materials were distributed via mobile messaging services, including WhatsApp (as the primary social media platform), MMS, and SMS. Descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, and multivariate linear regression were conducted using R studio version 4.3.3.

Results: Over 70% of participants were classified as having obesity, and 18.2% as overweight, leading to 88.3% of participants being classified as overweight or having obesity. A significant proportion of participants (68.8%) reported having an existing non-communicable disease (NCD). The MM-EE intervention significantly improved CHWs' food and nutrition literacy, reflected in improved median scores for meal preparation (43.1% [IQR: 19.6] pre- vs. 62.7% [IQR: 11.7] post-intervention), planning (58.6% [IQR: 12.1] pre- vs. 67.2% [IQR: 13.4] post-intervention), and overall food and nutrition literacy (63.0% [IQR: 8.1] pre- vs. 69.4% [IQR: 10.9] post-intervention; p <.001).

Conclusion: The study showed effective MM-EE intervention outcomes, positioning this method of health dissemination as suitable for improving the food and nutrition literacy of CHWs in South Africa. The study suggests the potential effectiveness of MM-EE approaches to enhance the health knowledge of the South African population. However, adaptation for the wider population will require further research on scalability, sustainability and an improved intervention design to address all dimensions of literacy.