Projects - dr. TH (Tesfaye) Bekele PhD

My postdoctoral research is on Global Diet Quality Project 

Motivation and Aims

This project aims to collect dietary quality data in the general adult population across countries worldwide, and to provide the tools for valid and feasible diet quality monitoring within countries. The project enables the collection of consistent, comparable dietary data across countries for the first time.

The Global Diet Quality project provides two main global public goods:

Diet Quality Questionnaire (DQQ) module takes 5 minutes to implement and adapt for each country. The DQQ is an internationally standardized survey instrument that works universally while also capturing local realities and can be used to interpret diet quality within and across countries. Country-adapted DQQ modules can be easily implemented and analyzed by any survey team interested in gathering information on diet quality. The availability of these low-burden tools is intended to facilitate and catalyze diet quality monitoring in countries and across sectors.

Data on diet quality across countries. The Gallup World Poll is implementing the DQQ, starting with the first phase in 56 countries in 2021-2022. A suite of diet quality indicators will be reported, capturing dietary adequacy and dietary risk factors for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). The data will enable monitoring of trends, and comparisons across different ages, gender, income, and urban/rural populations. Furthermore, DHS (the Demographic and Health Surveys) is implementing selected questions of the DQQ for women and aligned questions for infants and young children.

As part of this research project, I am involved in data cleaning, analysis, interpretation (writeup of report and research findings), and assisting the overall coordination.