Completed Pregnancy, Children & Inherited Conditions Mental Health

SPRING (for MDGs): Sustainable Programme Incorporating Nutrition & Games (for Maximising child Development, Growth & Survival in disadvantaged populations).

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Funding £2.6M
Period Apr 2011 — Feb 2018

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A community health worker in rural India or Pakistan will deliver a set of simple games and nutrition advice to new mothers, aiming to reduce infant deaths and improve child development. This matters because millions of children in South Asia fail to reach their full potential due to malnutrition, poor stimulation, and maternal depression. Existing effective interventions rarely reach the families who need them most. The SPRING programme tackles this delivery gap by training existing community-based agents—people already working in villages—to integrate nutrition counselling, play-based stimulation, and mental health support into routine home visits. If the cluster randomised trials succeed, the programme could provide a scalable, low-cost model for improving child survival, growth, and cognitive development across low-resource settings. The research includes detailed cost-effectiveness analysis, so funders and governments will know exactly what it costs to implement. A framework for scaling up to other regions will also be developed, meaning the approach could spread beyond India and Pakistan to other countries with similar community health systems.

View original technical description
The goal of SPRING, Sustainable Programme Incorporating Nutrition & Games, is to develop an innovative, feasible, affordable and sustainable approach that can achieve delivery at scale of known effective interventions to maximise child development, growth and survival by using existing community-based agents (CBAs) in India and Pakistan. The SPRING intervention will be developed through extensive formative research, holding an intervention development workshop with local and international stakeh olders and experts to review the findings and make decisions about intervention content and structure, and by piloting the intervention with a few CBAs and their supervisors in order to test all operational elements. The resulting intervention will be evaluated through cluster randomised controlled trials in each setting, each involving 20 CBA supervisory zones, with 15-25 CBAs per zone, and recruiting 300 newborns per zone (a random subsample of 100 will have growth and development assessments) . Primary outcomes are infant mortality, maternal psychosocial distress at 6 months, quality of the home environment and maternal/child interaction at 1 year, and stunting and child development at 2 years. The programme will include detailed process and economic evaluations with both cost effectiveness and total cost analyses, and development of a framework for scale up to other settings.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Betty Kirkwood (EPMC Awardee)

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Original classification

Programme Grant

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.