HD4A.eu

Universität Heidelberg (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität) was founded in 1386 and is the oldest university in today’s Germany. Universität Heidelberg is home to 29,000 students, 8700 staff members and 535 professors and 13 faculties. With more than 27% international students, Heidelberg university is one of the most diverse universities in Germany. The university has established exchange programmes with more than 460 universities worldwide, Heidelberg’s marked global interconnectedness is also evidenced by its 27 university partnerships and an international research training group as well as its membership in European networks such as the League of European Research Universities (LERU), the Coimbra Group and the European University Alliance 4EU+. At Heidelberg Universität, Heidelberg Institute for Global Health (HIGH) is part of the Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg (UKHD). The research group “Climate Change, Nutrition and Health” at HIGH leads the Work Package “Mapping and Monitoring Diversity of Diets across Sub-Saharan Africa” in the HealthyDiets4Africa project.

In the project, UKHD has the main goal to characterize the diversity of diets across sub-Saharan Africa for different age groups, genders, locations, and socio-economic levels, and determine the changes of the identified dietary patterns across the project’s study locations. To achieve our specific objectives, we execute the following tasks:

• Data cleaning, plausibility checks and multiple imputations of dietary data from half a million people in 24 sub-Saharan African countries;
• Select dietary diversity measures to track changes upon dietary interventions in selected sub-Saharan Africa;
• Assess the usual diet of the project’s study populations (baseline) and calculate the distribution of the diversity indices; and
• Assess the dietary intakes of the project’s study populations (endline) and calculate the intervention effects on diversity indices