[Limits of conventional nutrition education: an example from a West African urban area]

The failure of conventional nutrition education, as practiced in Western Africa, is acknowledged by the author. This assessment follows the formative and summative evaluation of a nutrition education programme, directed towards the parents of hospitalized children, in a hospital, in the Ivory Coast. Often carried out within conventional health structures (maternal-child health centers, rural health centers, hospitals, etc...), the programme represents an addition to daily health care activities, with actions often too isolated and too limited to exert a decisive impact on public health. Most of the time, these programmes are conceived and implemented by health care workers who are inadequately motivated and trained in both nutrition and education. Poorly conceived messages that lack cultural, economic or social adaptation to the specified target population, authoritarian, unfeeling pedagogy, and inadequate educational tools lead to uncertain results. Results that are difficult to assess due to the absence of a clear definition of objectives and procedures for scientific evaluation. The author, in agreement with other recent studies, suggests that nutrition education should be viewed as the cumulative effect of all the various communication activities aimed at modifying those individual or community behaviours that affect the nutritional status of a given population. Multimedia nutrition education, however, can only be implemented once population needs and available communication channels have been identified. It is with the idea of promoting such multimedia activities that the network for nutrition education in Africa has been created (see p. 56).