The Real Medicine Foundation (RMF) and NYU’s prestigious Capstone program have announced a partnership and three graduate students have arrived in Jhabua, Madyha Pradesh to assist with RMF’s malnutrition program.
An estimated 60 million children under the age of five are estimated to be malnourished India. The state where RMF is concentrating, Madhya Pradesh, has the country’s highest malnutrition burden, with 60% of its children under-five malnourished. Of the six million malnourished children in the state, 1.3 million of them have severe acute malnutrition (SAM) and one million have moderate acute malnutrition (MAM).
Children with MAM are able to recover with careful diet regulation and nutritional supplements, and generally do not require hospitalization. SAM presents itself in two general forms: complicated and uncomplicated. Complicated SAM entails outlying medical complications such as hypothermia and pneumonia. Both forms of SAM require a minimum stay of 14 days in a hospital.
RMF’s comprehensive approach to eradicating malnutrition focuses on the entire continuum of care from identification to treatment and prevention. The students will be conducting 14 days of field research to gather information on malnutrition knowledge, prevention activities, and treatment in government facilities throughout Jhabua and Alirajpur districts. Their research will help provide RMF with baseline analysis for new districts and with information about communities and facilities that are in need of assistance, as well as identify obstacles and problems faced by malnutrition field workers when working with local communities.
We will be taking the students to all 5 Nutritional Rehabilitation Centers in Jhabua and Alirajpur to assess the centralized treatment of SAM. In addition, the students will be going to village Anganwadi Centers, both rural and town, to interview Anganwadi workers about their needs, knowledge, and any recommendations they may have into improvements that could help children.
The RMF team here is excited to have the students, and is very much looking forward to their help and insights!
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Tags: Capstone, Jhabua, madhya pradesh, malnutrition
The following is taken from the article, UNICEF: Poor nutrition is killing children, stunting growth on CNN.com
Hunger is stunting hundreds of millions of children in the developing world, and more than 90 percent of them live in Africa and Asia, UNICEF says.
Poor nutrition is one of the main killers of young children, the U.N. Children’s Fund says in the new report “Tracking Progress on Child and Maternal Nutrition.”
Tags: CNN, malnutrition, UNICEF
The following information was taken from the article: Desperate Farmers Sell Wives to Pay Debts in Rural India. High Noon video
In her article, Sarah Sidner describes how in India, husbands are selling their wives and parents are selling their daughters to pay off impossible debts incurred after years of drought and resulting crop failure.
Clearly, this is not simply an issue of poverty but also one of culture structure where women are seen as potential currency.
Tags: children, CNN, debt, drought, keeping familes together, madhya pradesh, malnutrition, rural farmers, Sarah Sidner, women
Please watch this great video made by our friends at the World Bank. They do a great job at explaining malnutrition in India and what we can do about it. WB recently gave RMF a longer, India-specific version of this video, in Hindi, that has been edited and adapted as a tool to train field workers in nutrition. We’re using this video during our training sessions with local NGOs and self-help groups to give them an introduction on malnutrition.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoWmbd-Nx6U
Tags: India, malnutrition
Widespread malnutrition in Madhya Pradesh, India – A note from the field
Jhabua, Alirajpur, Khandwa, Khargone June 2009
The Student Prince movie Malnutrition is one of the most serious and large scale health problems facing the Indian state today:
Tags: drought, field report, India, madhya pradesh, malnutrition, monsoon
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24kristof.html
Nicholas Kristof writes about malnutrition in Africa, but touches on some of the same issues we face with our malnutrition eradication program in India. Malnutrition in India is most often not a result of the lack of food, but a lack of proper nutrition compounded by a lack of education about what constitutes proper nutrition and young child feeding practices.
Malnutrition eradication approaches in India over the past 30 years have focused on food security, trying to ensure that families across the country have access to staple foods. This has resulted in a well developed food distribution system, even in emergency circumstances, but has not achieved reduction in malnutrition – there actually have been increases in some areas.
I’ve included two maps below, the first which maps malnutrition for children under 5 years old, and the second which maps food insecurity in India – rating households’ access to food. You’ll see that there is a close connection between food insecurity and malnutrition, but this isn’t the only element at play. Madhya Pradesh, the state with the highest, “extremely alarming” malnutrition rate is not the state with the highest level of food insecurity.
Tags: malnutrition, nutrition
Field in Umri, Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh. April 2009
Last week I blogged about our program launch. We realize that it is unusual in the NGO world for an organization to launch such an ambitious initiative in such a short period of time. While in the ideal world we could have spent many more months planning, doing baselines assessments, and fundraising, we know that we need to act as soon as possible with the resources we have because if we wait too long human lives are our opportunity costs.
Tags: draught, India, madhya pradesh, malnutrition, migration
Dr. Fabian Toegel addressing men and women representing over 40 tribal villages in malnutrition identification, treatment, and prevention. April 25th, 2009
After almost two months of planning, field assessments, and speaking to everyone from mothers of malnourished children to politicians we launched the first phase of our malnutrition eradication program in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh with two trainings in malnutrition identification, treatment, and prevention over the past week. Our intervention will be a long-term, holistic initiative, with not just trainings but consistent onsite activities and follow up over the next two years, but this past week we started with the first step, a training to create awareness and to increase referrals of severe acute malnutrition to government centers.
Tags: Add new tag, health, India, madhya pradesh, malnutrition, Related Links, tribal health
Starting RMF’s Malnutrition Program in India I Love Trouble
Last month sitting comfortably with a cup of coffee and my laptop, I sat on my balcony in Delhi and read a New York Times article by Somini Sengupta titled “As India Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/world/asia/13malnutrition.html Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End download ). Living in India and considering myself a well-informed hand of the development sector, I knew that malnutrition was one of the nagging problems pulling back at India’s development, but the awesome extent to which malnutrition plagues this country was a shock. With 46% of India’s future threatened by malnutrition, to call the problem India’s “a national shame,” in the words of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is just the beginning.
Tags: India, madhya pradesh, malnutrition, Related Links
Tags: children, India, malnutrition, Related Links
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