Saving lives of malnourished children
If you drive about a 100 kms away from Mumbai, you reach Palghar, a region known as the Deccan Trap because of its hilly terrain, inadequate rainfall and challenging landscape. Go a bit further inside and you reach Mokhada, a small block, where you will be met by the local tribal community of about 90,000 people spread across 59 villages. Crop failures, inadequate water, coupled with unemployment and a lack of livelihood has led to startling undernutrition levels in their families, especially in young children under five years of age.
Girls often marry and become mothers very young, which becomes yet another compelling reason why we find every fourth child in Mokhada too thin for their height and every second child too short for their age. These are critical indicators of children’s health and if not addressed urgently, there will soon emerge a generation of children who are not growing up to their full potential and capabilities.
In April 2016, Fight Hunger Foundation began a treatment programme on a community based model, where assessment, treatment and prevention activities are designed and carried out together with communities, health services and governmental structures. Malnourished children are identified within communities, and then the majority of them are rehabilitated at home.
Our project has four pillars of interventions:
- Inpatient treatment of children who are severely malnourished and have a medical condition
- Outpatient treatment of children by providing them home-based therapy and counselling
- Capacity building of frontline health workers, enabling them to better carry out their duties
- Community awareness campaigns on prevention of malnutrition
We have, ever since, spread our work to 59 villages and reached out to a population of about 50,000 women, men and children. We operate 4 Outpatient Treatment Centres (OTCs) where through weekly visits, our staff of doctors, nurses and counsellors provide malnourished children with appropriate food, monitor their weight and height, and counsel the parents on nutrition and sanitation practices.
Fight Hunger Foundation is honoured to have signed an MoU with the Department of Women and Child Development (WCD), Government of Maharashtra in January 2018, to scale up our nutrition intervention programmes in other high burden districts across the State.
We invite like-minded individuals to join us in this fight to end child hunger in our country. We will work with you and create opportunities, where you can contribute your time, skill or resources to further progress our work and create unsurpassed happiness in the lives of our children.
For any further details, kindly write to aiyer@fighthungerfoundation.org or call 9167584077 / (022) 2407 5009 or visit www.fighthungerfoundation.org
