Many child health, nutrition, and development efforts focus on caregivers, those persons responsible for the provision of nurturing care to infants and young children. To make positive changes in nutrition, caregivers need to draw on resources linked to their own physical and psychological well-being and sense of self. For this toolkit, these resources are defined and measured as individual-level factors but also reflect household, community, and societal contexts and can be used to inform population-level program design and evaluations.

Caregiver Resources support a caregiver’s ability to:

• provide care that produces positive child nutrition, health, and/or development outcomes.
• participate in services, programs or activities aimed at improving child nutrition, health, and/or development outcomes.
• ensure that their families benefit by putting new skills and ideas into practice

Caregiver Resources are an essential link between policies, programs and services provided and the adoption and practice of recommended behaviors to improve child health, nutrition, and development.

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In Bangladesh, the Alive & Thrive initiative aimed to increase Caregiver Resources to support priority behaviors, including feeding green leafy vegetables and introducing eggs between six and eight months of age. Using the maternal self-efficacy complementary feeding scale, the program assessed direct, indirect, and enhanced paths of self-efficacy on these two behaviors. The findings showed that increasing self-efficacy did increase feeding of green leafy vegetables to young children, but not eggs.