Global Philanthropic Report 2019 - SECT, VKF & Go2C

To be able to better support Nourishing School’s toolkit implementation endeavors, SECT helped
bring 10 Lakhs of funding from Cochin Shipyard Limited in the last financial year. The funding was
spent on Nourishing School Programs in twenty schools in Wayanad.
To improve the condition of underweight and undernourished children in Faridabad, Go2C has
been working with the Women and Child Department, Faridabad, to bring knowledge of nutrition
onto the ground, specifically into the households and kitchens of the caregivers of these children.
To be able to do this, Go2C has chosen a pilot location called Rahul Colony, a slum-dwelling
community of migrant workers in the middle of Faridabad. It was quite challenging to develop
nutritional awareness in a community which lives hand-to-mouth. Many caregivers are not able
to pay attention to their children as they are daily wage labourers or maids working in multiple
homes and cannot care for their own.
Let us take this actual case of Pragati: She is a 5-month old, severely underweight baby born after
two miscarriages to a mother with special needs. The father being a vegetable seller can only
make enough money to take the little one to an unregistered medical practitioner who has
recommended a few medicines. As she grows, Pragati and her family will need supervision
personally from a capable Anganwadi Worker, who is the department’s last mile resource on the
ground and will help her family work towards inculcating sound nutrition practices for her
growth. Go2C now seeks to build a model to empower the average Anganwadi Worker so that
she may be able to gauge such a situation, provide specific care, and bring additional nutritional
knowledge while helping build a forum of knowledge of the caregivers in the community.
Go2C’s idea has been to implement a sound quality program at the circle level and then create a
model to scale to the district level. In this process, Go2C started to meet with all caregivers of
children who are in the orange and red zones of the WCD Register, doing home visits to
understand what medical, nutritional, or external reasons could be causes for malnutrition. In
addition to this, Go2C also contributed to the convergence of the Health and WCD Departments,
which will ensure timely supervision of doctors over specific undernourishment cases of children.
We will be proceeding with nutrition camps where we will be teaching mothers low-cost and
easy-to-make, locally-sourced nutritional recipes that can be a boon to them, and especially their
children, and are also trying to create a sense of adherence and commitment to nutrition by going
to the ground to help caregivers realize the importance of nutrition and hygiene. This adherence
and sense of commitment is achieved through touching base continuously with the mothers and
caregivers at their doorstep.
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