Abstract:
Background: Good nutrition during pregnancy has a paramount importance to the growth and
development of infants and better nutritional status of the Mothers. Lack of dietary diversity is a
serious health problems in developing countries because diets are dominantly starchy staples.
There is limited data regarding the dietary diversity practice and factors associated during
pregnancy including the study area and the local prevalence of the problem is unknown.
Objective: to assess the Prevalence and associated factor of Dietary Diversity among pregnant
women in Hundanne, Harari region, eastern Ethiopia.
Methods: Community -based cross-sectional study design was conducted on 627 randomly
selected pregnant women lives in Hundanne of, Harari regional state on March 2020.The Women
Dietary Diversity Score tool developed by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and
Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) was used. Dietary diversity was assessed using
a 24 hours dietary recall method, and the dietary diversity score was computed for ten food groups.
Data were entered into Epi-Data with double entry verification, and analysis was done using IBM
SPSS version 21. Level of significance was set to at P < 0.05 with 95% confidence interval (Costa
et al.) to identify the independent factors associated with adequate dietary diversity and variance
inflation factor (VIF) and correlation coefficient were used to control the relation between each
independent variable. Finally Strength of association was checked using Odd ratio and model
fitness.
Results: A total of 595 pregnant women involved in this study with response rate 94.8%.This
study has shown that 31.4% [95% CI ;( 28, 35.5)] of the study participants were ate five or more
than five food group which consider as good dietary practices. Concerning dietary knowledge,
54.7% of the study participants had good dietary knowledge. Mother Education, occupation,
number of family, wealth index, garden practice, shown to have significant association (P < 0.05)
with dietary practices.
Conclusion: good dietary practices of pregnant women in the study area was low. Mother’s
education, occupation like government, number of individual ≤4, house hold wealth index, home
garden practice, eating three and above were some of independent predictors of good dietary
practices. Empowering mother and nutritional counseling should delivered.
