Program Summary

This program improves nutrition for children at home and at school in 30 villages in rural Ningxia and Shaanxi provinces. Through supporting the local government and communities, a nutritional education program changes behaviours and provides for sustainable provision of nutritious food.

Why we are doing it?

Mal-nutrition is a threat to school-age children in rural China: the anemia rate is 18 per cent, stunted growth 26 per cent and Vitamin A deficiency per cent. A national survey shows wide spread deficiency in Calcium, Iron, and Vitamin A. Also, in China many rural schools are being shut down as funding and resources are taken out of village schools and injected into centralised schools. As a result, children often have no choice but to live in or travel long distances to attend centralised schools. Many of these children do not receive sufficient amount of vegetables and dairy products in their diet, and those who do may only have two meals a day. 

Parents and schools lack awareness and capacity to ensure children’s nutrition while insufficient investment is made by the government. Poor hygiene practice and sanitation facilities also further deteriorate nutrition status.

Our Approach

Building on a previously successful project, this program intends to improve the nutrition of school children in the target schools by improving the school health policy, providing sanitation products for use in schools, providing school health education classes and creating sustainable methods for the schools to provide nutritious food. This will be done by:

·      Collaborating with local government, especially education bureaus.

·      Building the capacity of schools to mobilise resources to provide, by growing suitable crops and breeding animals, nutritious food to the children in a sustainable way through school kitchens.

·      Educating the local community in modern nutrition – specifically children, parents and village representatives.

·      Creating a pool of local nutrition experts to implement and support the program.

·      Introducing a simple and innovative nutrition measurement system that children will self-administer. This program will be closely integrated with our current Education and Sanitation program. 

Program Goals

·      Build the capacity of teachers to provide nutrition education to children and parents

·      Design a participatory school nutrition program

Program Activities

·         Plan China will work with local technical support teams, consisting of capable teachers and members of the inspection of local education and health bureaus, to build their capacity in supporting teachers to develop school based curriculum and modules in nutrition

·         With the support from local technical support teams, teachers will work with children to develop school based curriculum and modules to increase children’s understanding of nutrition and engage parents through child-led activities and school management meetings to increase their awareness on nutrition.

·         The local technical support teams will support the teachers to engage parents, children and school kitchen managers in a participatory discussion process to identify low cost and effective ways for ensure children’s nutrition, and clarify the responsibilities of children, parents, teachers and kitchen managers.

·         Monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the nutrition program.

Program Partners

·      Ministry of Education

·      Xi’an Jiaotong University

·      Public Health Department

Future of the Program

·      Program Outcomes of Child Nutrition Program will be shared through mass media to policy makers, academia, media, other NGOs, children and parents.  Through sharing of information Plan China hopes to encourage involvement and support from these groups.

·      Based on the results from the previous intervention, a replicable module on child nutrition will be developed and scaled up to larger areas.

·      Results from the program will be disseminated to the Education Ministry and Public Health Ministry aiming to improve the related policy

Impact

7,000 children in 15,000 households will benefit covering 20 schools in 30 villages. Additionally, the program will improve the entire family's nutritional knowledge and nutrition, establish a sustainable source of nutrition from the schools' vegetable and animal raising activities and develop a nutritional curriculum. We expect the program’s success to influence the provincial Ministry of Education’s future policies. The materials and pool of experts that will be set up will be used to later scale-up the program.