Help Us Feed Malnourished Children in India

The new school year has started in June and this year we have improved by mid day meal program to a great extent.

Our Approach Till Now : The Mid Day Meal Program is a food and hunger relief program for students in low income and budget private schools

Our New Approach - The Mid Day Meal Program is now a holistic health improvement program and not just a food distribution program

How and Why

Applying design thinking principles,DBM evaluated why is the over all health of these students/children so low? Why do so many of kids suffer from undernourishment and low quality food supplies. How is the health of these students affected by their surroundings 

We realised the following 

1) Parents are unaware of nourishment principles and what constitues a good diet?

2) General hygiene and sanitation facilities are low - leading to lower immunity and regular health issues

3) Focus on physical activity and good health maintenance habits is lacking

How did we change our approach

1) We have started with conducting awareness sessions with parents and have involved nutritionists in this process. We will now we doing 1 session with parents every quarter and will give them health reports of their wards

2) We have arranged for doctors and health professionals to conduct sanitation and hygiene sessions every quarter and will have regular health checkups and BMI checkups for these kids. Children who are very close to the malnourishment zone - will be given special diets and supplements.

3) Schools will organise yoga and PT classes for the children on a weekly basis and DBM will organise sport days and annual days to propogate better physical health and good health habits.

Expected Impact

A more holistic approach will clearly affect the health of the students in all aspects. most importantly being the intervention with parents who will understand the nutrition needs of their children better. Currently, parents just handover some money to their child to eat what they want, which ends up being sometthing that tastes better(junk food, street food) but is not good for health.

The new approach will change that and impact the root cause of the program leading to overall better results, especially during non school days when the students are completely at the mercy of their parents.

• Report by Pranit Patil - Program Coordinator (PDF)
  

Dear Donors,

Thank you for all your support over the last year.

The Mid Day Meal Project has had a great year.

This year we learned about our children's health a lot more and simultaneously learned about how we can make our mid day meal programme a complete health improvement programme.

Over the last 6 months, here are the highlights of our work

- Our analysis showed that, we had 119 students out of 1948 total children who were severly malnourished and their health has improved in the last 3 months

- Parents of these targeted children met with our coordinator and were giving sessions on how to make sure their children get a low cost but high nutrition meal. A total of 84 parents of 119 came for these meetings 

Road Map Ahead

The next year will be a very exciting year for us. The Mid Day Meal Programme will now be called the "Dharma Bharathi Mission Student Health Improvement Programme"

As the name suggests, the programme will not only focus on food and mid day meal delivery, but on overall health improvement.

- Along with food every day, the students will have a weekly yoga and activity session

- The schools will be organising an annual sports day in collaboration with DBM

- There will sessions with parents every 3 months to give them knowledge about child and adolescent nutrition along with hygience and health related precautions that need to be taken at home

- The sessions with the children, will focus on, not only hygiene and sanitation, but also have sex education classes for children above age 10.

While doing these activities, we will measure and monitor the health and growth of all the students under the programme. 

With support from you donors, larger grant giving organisations, we will be able to reach out and target 2000 additional children, making it a total of 4000 children over 2018-19 academic year who will benefit from the programme.

As always, we look forward to your support.