Infant and Child Nutrition
THE CHALLENGE
About half of all childhood deaths in developing countries are associated with malnutrition. Improving nutritional status would not only eliminate deaths due to malnutrition, but would also avert a significant proportion of deaths due to diarrhea, measles, pneumonia, and other common childhood diseases. Yet, the routine use of nutrition interventions in health programs remains low.
Health services in many countries are not adequate to deliver high quality nutrition interventions. And, successful community-based pilot programs in nutrition have been difficult to scale up and sustain. Moreover, many programs do not give sufficient attention to the constraints that can prevent caregivers from feeding their children properly, like beliefs that colostrum is bad for a newborn baby, family pressures to feed water instead of exclusive breastfeeding, or a heavy workload that gives mothers little time to prepare appropriate and nutritious complementary foods.
KEY INTERVENTIONS
BASICS identified the Essential Nutrition Actions (ENA), a set of proven interventions that improve the growth and micronutrient status of infants and children, and reduce child deaths due to malnutrition. For example, exclusive breastfeeding could prevent 13% of global child deaths by promoting optimal growth while also preventing diarrhea and pneumonia in a more cost-effective manner than other approaches. Vitamin A supplementation can reduce childhood mortality by 20% to 30% among children living in areas with a high prevalence of deficiency. The "ENA Approach" championed by BASICS has three main programmatic thrusts: (1) incorporating the ENA into maternal and child health services, and expanding community outreach, especially in underserved areas; (2) building capacity at the community level for delivering ENA interventions through community workers, organizations, and volunteers; and (3) using multiple communications channels to inform, sensitize, and motivate key audiences.BASICS promotes the ENA at the community level through a variety of vehicles, such as community-based growth promotion (CBGP), positive deviance inquiry coupled with hearth-based nutritional rehabilitation, mother support groups, and nutritionally-appropriate case management of childhood illness.