Feeding the Future
Tech-Based Nutrition Training and Community Dialogue under Poshan Abhiyan
🧩 Partner: Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) and UNICEF | 🗓 December 2018 | 📍 New Delhi
Context
Poshan Abhiyaan (National Nutrition Mission) was launched in 2018 as India’s flagship programme. The goal was to improve nutritional outcomes using a mix of technology, convergence and community involvement. A targeted approach was adopted to reduce the level of stunting, under-nutrition, anemia and low birth weight in children, while focusing on adolescent girls, pregnant women and lactating mothers.
To ensure a holistic approach, all 36 States/UTs and 550 districts were covered in a phased manner between 2017 and 2019, reaching 100 million people. Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) with technical support from UNICEF India, implemented the communication outreach and dialogue for achieving behaviour change in selected districts across nine states.
The Need
To develop a training curriculum that can be adapted by 36 states and union territories capturing their social and cultural nuances, bottlenecks in accessing nutrition benefits and adopting behaviours and practices that are nutrition-friendly.
The Insight
A systematic training methodology that follows a cascade model to reach a large audience and which makes efficient use of technology has the potential to achieve nutritional goals.
The Solution
NCCDC facilitated a 4-day Training-of-Trainers (ToT) for 17 members of DEF. They were trained as Master Trainers (MT) who, in turn, were tasked with training 200 Poshan Preraks selected by DEF. The training guided them on how to conduct community dialogue on nine nutrition related themes relevant for pregnant women, lactating mothers, infant children and adolescent girls. They were also trained on using the Mera App for monitoring the intervention.