Project Area – Slum areas of Ward 58, 66 & 80 under Kolkata Municipal Corporation West Bengal
Client – UNICEF, Kolkata
Project Duration – Staring Date: August 2020; Ending Date February 2021
Malnutrition is an overriding threat affecting women and children alike. While Anganwadi services are widely popular for nutrition supplementation and extensively accepted in the rural region, the urban population are often served and catered to through various non-government services. As a result of which the need and urge of the urban community to avail the established services are way lower than the rural regions. The Covid 19 situation has prevented infants and children, adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating mothers from receiving the nutritious food and appropriate counselling from Anganwadi centres which they would have otherwise received. The lockdown linked nutrition support has most likely bypassed the targeted audience and benefited those outside the ambit of the scheme.
To strengthen and re-orient the nutrition behaviour of target beneficiaries particularly in the context of the COVID-19 scenario and to support AWCs in resuming their services following the COVID-19 Guidelines, INSPIRATION joined hands with UNICEF to intervene in 3 wards – Ward 58, 66 and 80 of Kolkata Municipality.
The multipronged intervention approach has been conceived along the following verticals :
- Resuming and strengthening AWC services through facilitation/ handholding through capacity building of AWWs and AWHs in light of Covid-19 with a special emphasis on identification of Severe Underweight children and their appropriate referral.
- Strengthening community preparedness and awareness generation, attitudinal reorientation and practicing appropriate feeding practices for addressing (mal) nutrition issues within the Covid-19 conditions for children in different age categories and mothers
- Developing Community Volunteers Primarily Young Women for a time-based big push towards normalcy and sustenance of the neo-normal service delivery practice under Covid 19 conditions
- Use of simple technology platforms for capacity building, communication and The outcome is given below.