Prevention

MALNUTRITION PREVENTION PROGRAM

The fight against hunger is not just about distributing food. It requires long term solutions enabling communities to be able to plan and cope on their own by introducing a wide range of actions such as farming, forestry and helping families to create their own income to buy food. By creating self-reliance & sufficiency, vulnerable communities can work by themselves out of poverty. Action Against Hunger aims to achieve nutrition security at household level and empower women to improve the family diet therefore improving the nutritional status of women and children.

Our Objective is as follows:

A massive scaling-up of treatment programmes to cover many more malnourished children.

Increased coverage, with broader access to treatment.

A reduction in social costs associated with SAM treatment, as parents and caregivers are able to treat severely malnourished children without medical complications at home, without leaving the rest of the family or foregoing income-generating activities.

The various activities undertaken by us are:

Promoting Kitchen Garden:

Establishing kitchen gardens at Anganwadi Centres and at individual household level to combat household food insecurity and malnutrition. The production of fruits and vegetables provides the household with direct access to important nutrients that may not be readily available or within their economic reach. Home gardening increases the diversity of foods and promotes household self-sufficiency. Equally important, kitchen gardening has been shown to be a source of additional income for the household through the sale of a percentage of the garden produce.

Focusing on essential primary health care interventions

Infectious diseases impede dietary intake and utilization, resulting in malnutrition. Consequently one of the most important mthods of improving nutritional status is to control and prevent most common childhood infectious diseases. Therefore the project will focus on ensuring primary health care to children like full immunization, biannual vitamin A supplementation with deworming, appropriate and active feeding of children during and after illness, including oral rehydration with zinc supplementation during diarrhoea and timely, high quality therapeutic feeding and care for all children with severe acute malnutrition through government system.

Growth monitoring and nutrition promotion

While growth monitoring alone does not necessarily change nutritional status, it does provide important information to be used in actions such as food supplementation, nutrition education and medical referral, when needed. Children in the age group of 0-5are monitored every month to assess their nutritional status using anthropometric measurement (viz) height, weight and Middle Upper Arm Circumference.

Promoting personal hygiene, sanitation, safe drinking water and food safety through nutrition education and communication

Instilling better eating habits and positive health behaviour is one of the most challenging tasks in overall efforts to improve nutrition. We educate the community about a variety of safe and affordable foods, healthy diet, appropriate frequency of feeding children, use of balanced foods (containing sufficient energy, nutrients, micro-nutrients, such as Vitamin A) optimal child feeding and care practices, cooking practices, hygiene and sanitation and how to meet their nutritional needs.