GCRF Action against Stunting Hub

International development projects often bring in high levels of expertise, but struggle to bridge the understanding of those external experts to the lived reality of the target populations. This is reported to be a significant source of ineffectiveness in such projects.

The GCRF Action against Stunting Hub study lies within a larger investigation of childhood stunting in India, Indonesia and Senegal involving a multidisciplinary team of health experts, and here we use a method to elicit portraits of shared values of groups of local people, and to then elicit contextualised local perceptions of stunting and its affiliated factors, to inform the health experts.

Grounded thematic coding is used to bridge the data of locally expressed concepts, to topics of cognitive interest to the health experts. The same approach will later be used to elicit local perceptions of the legacy or impacts of the project.