The first 1,000 days — the period during a women’s pregnancy and the child’s first two years of life — represent a crucial window of opportunity to prevent malnutrition. Since 2014, CCDT’s Urban Nutrition Initiative has worked to reduce malnutrition by reaching out to children in this age group, and pregnant women & lactating mothers across eight high-burden ICDS projects. Celebrating National Nutrition Week Health workers across the country celebrate the importance of nutrition and health during the first week of September each year. CCDT organized nutrition awareness programs for community outreach and frontline workers in high-burden ICDS projects across H/East ward of Mumbai.
These activities were designed to increase their nutritional awareness: specifically enhancing their understanding of seven food groups, breastfeeding and complementary feeding. Since, these outreach health workers are oftentimes the first point of contact that women and children have with the health system, it is imperative to train them well. Through song and food competitions, the UNI team worked to enhance the community workers’ ability to share information on health and nutrition with women and children in a creative manner.
“Manisha says, these activities have taught us to work in groups. We have learned a lot from the sessions. The Nutrition week has helped us to get many creative ideas to spread awareness on 7 food groups from song competition, Movie presentation to Recipe demonstration. It will definitely help us during the field visits in the communities. It will make our session interesting for people to understand the key message. According to Anganwadi Sevikas, movie presentation is the best medium for communication.” – Manisha Dhanawade, Community Organizer, UNI