Making Nutrition Services Work for Socially Excluded Groups: Lessons from the Integrated Nutrition and Health Project

Abstract

A relatively large proportion of India's underweight children belong to groups facing multiple disadvantages. Addressing child malnutrition among these communities is critical if India is to eliminate undernutrition and achieve the MDG goals. This article draws evidence from the Integrated Nutrition and Health Project II (INHP-II), a USAID funded project, implemented by CARE in India, to show how, by ensuring universal service coverage, a programme can enhance equity and inclusion. INHP-approaches such as: Nutrition and health days (NHD); prioritising home contacts; system strengthening; community participation; tracking left-out children; enhancing convergence and coverage of nutritional and health services, all help to improve nutritional outcomes among all sections of society, particularly socially excluded groups.

The crisis of poor complementary feeding in South Asia: where next?

“…For example, assessments of India's flagship nutrition program, the Integrated Child Development Service have indicated substantial challenges with effectively incorporating behaviour change communication (Gragnolati et al . 2005), but efforts to catalyse and support the program to enhance outreach and preventive counseling in homes were somewhat successful (Kumar et al . 2009).…”

“…However, there are numerous known challenges in relation to implementing IYCF-related programs in the region, and questions remain about whether the strategies being implemented are effective enough. For example, assessments of India's flagship nutrition program, the Integrated Child Development Service have indicated substantial challenges with effectively incorporating behaviour change communication (Gragnolati et al 2005), but efforts to catalyse and support the program to enhance outreach and preventive counseling in homes were somewhat successful (Kumar et al 2009). In Bangladesh, various phases of government programs for nutrition lacked a solid IYCF focus, and have had mixed success (Hossain et al 2005;Martin 2009) but in recent years, IYCF has been prioritized and a national communications campaign for IYCF was launched in 2011.…”