The treatment group will receive 6 nutrition education and counseling sessions

The control group will not receive the program's nutrition education intervention, However, to minimize the Hawthorne effect (Sedgwick, 2012) on the intervention, the control group will be visited as well but will receive education on personal hygiene only. All participants will continue to receive any education that is part of standard care from their primary care providers

The treatment group will receive nutrition education (NE) and counseling 6 times. The 1st and 6th counselling sessions will be administered by a Registerd Dietitan in a health facility (weeks 21-22 and weeks 31-32). Four (4) bi-weekly follow-ups between these 2 sessions will be administered by Field Assistants (weeks 23, 25, 27 and 29) at the participant's home. NE will focus on dietary diversity and minimum meal frequency (Daniel et al, 2016; Gyimah et al., 2021), protein and energy intakes (Ota et al, 2015), intake of iron-rich foods (Otoo and Adam, 2016), guidelines for pregnancy with an emphasis on appropriate weight gain (Abubakar et al, 2016), and appropriate ingredients and food preparation methods required to optimize nutrition.

Health literacy (HL) in women will be assessed using the All Aspects of Health Literacy Scale (AAHLS) developed by Chinn and McCarthy (2013), and maternal health literacy (MHL) will be assessed using an abridged version of the Maternal Health Literacy Inventory In Pregnancy (MHELIP) (Taheri et al, 2020).

Maternal dietary diversity will also be determined from 24-hr recalls by assessing how many food groups a woman consumed each day based on FAO definitions (FAO and FHI 360, 2016)

Maternal nutrition knowledge (NK) will be assessed with a questionnaire adapted from abridged versions of 2 previously validated questionnaires (de Jersey et al., 2013; Parmenter and Wardle, 1999)