Title: Bangladesh Sirajganj Community Based Nutrition Project for Children
Goal: To improve the nutritional status of children
Outcome:
1. Improve food stability through home gardening
2. Improve dietary habits for children through school feeding
3. Establish a nutrition-friendly school environment
4. Improve awareness of children’s nutrition in the community
Activity:
1.1.1. Provide seeds or livestock
1.1.2. Provide technical training for home gardening & rasing livestoke
1.1.3. Regular home gardening monitoring
1.1.4. Provide the education of dietary habits and crop consumption for nutritional quality
2.1.1. Supply the food ingredients for school feeding
2.2.1. Organize and operate the school feeding management committee
2.2.2. Develop the school feeding manual
2.3.1. Provide school feeding
3.1.1. Construction of school feeding facilities
3.1.2. Construction and renovation of WASH facilities
3.2.1. Conduct standard health checkup
3.2.2. Monitor and manage the growth status for childeren
3.2.3. Manage the acute malnourished and health vulnerable children
Lesson Learned:
| Situation | Lesson Learned |
| 1. Stakeholders’ engagement promotes collective awareness and consensus: | The larger engagement of various stakeholders in the project activities, such as, School Management Committee (SMC), School Feeding management Committee (SFMC), teachers, parents and community members, resulting in improving awareness and community consensus on children health care, nutrition and education. People who are directly or indirectly involved with the project activities or visited the project activities, are becoming aware of the importance of nutritious food and how to address children’s needs in terms of food, health and education. We hired different expertise personnel like nutritionists, public health specialists, agriculturists, livestock officers and veterinary surgeons for crating awareness on nutrition, homestead gardening and livestock rearing. We also develop manuals, booklets, bill board for creating awareness in the community level. |
| 2. Implementation modality of project activities contributes in income generation and women empowerment acceleration: | Parents of those children who were malnourished have also been engaged in training on home-gardening and raising livestock, later provided vegetable seeds, fertilizers, livestock and feeds of livestock. Since fathers of those children are mostly busy in their work outside, mothers are mostly involved with the project activities beside children. The awareness among parents, especially mothers, and the home gardening and livestock raising activities are led by mothers, eventually resulted in income generation. This has also strengthened the mother’s position as a decision maker in the family. As mothers engaged with some income generation activities like homestead gardening and livestock rearing, they can play some roles for extra earnings which can be translated as a form of women empowerment acceleration in the context of the project areas. We also provided some seasonal fruits tree the target beneficiaries which will be a part of income generation in near future and it will also play roles for reducing nutrition gaps. |
| 3. Feeding facility in schools attracts new students: | Earlier, no such project was implemented in the project areas. GNB first introduced the mid-day meal facility in three schools of Raiganj, Sirajganj. Because of the mid-day meal and other facilities provided by GNB in those three schools, not only the attendance rate of student increased, rather the student from nearest schools started taking admission in those school. Some dropped out students also came back to school. |