Introduction
EVENTS
Adverse environmental conditions during pregnancy, such as food insecurity, can negatively impact the psychological and physiological health of women as well as the development of the fetus [Whether food insecurity during pregnancy provokes negative maternal health outcomes can depend on how stressful pregnant women perceive this environmental condition to be. According to Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional stress theory [In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), food insecurity is particularly high among smallholder farming households, attributable to factors such as climate change-related extreme events and seasonality, which hamper agricultural production [Agricultural interventions that focus on PHL, a well-known contributor to food insecurity, may be helpful to counteract the negative effects of food insecurity on maternal mental health and the intergenerational adverse health effects for the offspring. One method to improve crop storage is the distribution of hermetic storage bags instead of conventional polypropylene bags. Hermetic bags have been shown to improve crop storage in Tanzania and thus reduce PHL significantly [In summary, on the correlation level, numerous studies have shown that food insecurity is associated with poorer mental health outcomes. We take this research forward by determine whether an agricultural intervention to improve food security (allocation and use of hermetic storage bags in households) can have beneficial mental health outcomes for pregnant women from smallholder households. We hypothesized that pregnant women in the treatment households would experience lower perceived stress and higher perceived coping as compared to pregnant women in the control households. Following the randomly allocated intervention, we collected perceived stress and perceived coping data over several months using monthly short message service (SMS)-based surveys. The treatment effects were analyzed via Intention-to-treat (ITT) analyses.