Nutrition

Globally, poor nutrition and under nutrition underlie up to 60% of childhood illness and death, emphasizing a critical need to address nutrition throughout childhood. Mercy Corps has rehabilitated thousands of malnourished children around the world and prevented future malnutrition by supporting change in child feeding habits at the household, community and organizational level. Our programming on nutrition is designed to:

Promote improved access to food Increase the capacity of mothers to improve child nutrition Address chronic malnutrition by partnering with local communities to build on best practices Improve child nutrition in emergency settings through efficient home-based interventions

What We Do

Adequate access to food is a primary barrier to good nutrition in developing countries. Our response to this need varies from one community to the next, based on each particular set of circumstances. In one community we help obtain a windmill so water can be pumped to properly irrigate crops, in another we help set up a nursery to grow tomato seedlings that cannot otherwise be acquired, and in many communities we set up food programs in schools where young children can rely on at least one nutritious, high-protein meal a day.

Malnutrition is also rooted in a lack of knowledge of best feeding practices. We encourage breastfeeding in all postnatal interventions, including exclusive breastfeeding from birth to 6 months of age, and also support the establishment of Baby Friendly Hospitals, which encourage early and exclusive nursing. We also include iron-folate distribution in all of our postnatal services and Vitamin A and Zinc distribution in services to children. To build on the best practices of community health workers, we provide trainings in the signs of malnutrition, weight control and food supplementation, and create opportunities for health workers to share best practices with and learn from each other.

Mercy Corps is well known for its response to disaster throughout the world. Drought and other climatic changes often precipitate severe food shortages and at times outright famine. For decades we have responded with direct aid in times of crisis, and we couple this aid with monitoring to make sure food and supplies are equitably distributed and optimally used.

Where We Work

To date Mercy Corps has implemented more than 148 community health programs in 32 countries around the world. Here is a sample of some of our Nutrition programming.

Niger

Niger has one of the fastest growing populations in the world, with each woman giving birth to an average of over 7 children. Unfortunately many of these children are malnourished. Of kids under 3 years old, nearly half are either chronically malnourished or underweight for their age. Mercy Corps is working to change this. We have had community-driven programming in Niger since 2005 and are bringing hope to thousands.

We are supporting the integration of nutrition rehabilitation programs into nearly 100 rural public health centers, where populations are often hardest hit, and community volunteers are assisting government health staff in undertaking this work. As a result, more than 40,000 at-risk and malnourished children have accessed services since program inception. Also, empowered with new skills, community health workers and committees have begun to participate more fully with government health organizations and as a result health monitoring, reporting and coordination have improved.

Indonesia

The current Health and Nutrition Program of Mercy Corps Indonesia, called SENYUM - literally meaning "smile" in Indonesian - has long been involved in recognizing factors causing malnutrition in urban Jakarta and working with communities through a methodology called Hearth. The Hearth methodology uses an approach to identify households with healthy children defined by their good nutrition status despite having the same limited resources as their neighbors with malnourished children. This approach is called Positive Deviance.

Discovering how families in the same community keep children healthy enables families to not only improve their children's weight, but to maintain the improved nutritional status at home. In this approach, two-week community rehabilitation sessions, Hearths or Nutrition Education and Rehabilitation Sessions, take place in a community volunteer's house. During these sessions, caretakers contribute food, cook together, feed their children, discuss health messages and examine best health practices found in families with healthy children. Health volunteers subsequently visit the participating families' homes to reinforce the health messages and discuss their children's health. Mercy Corps' extensive experience with this approach has proven successful in reducing malnutrition from 36 percent to 16.7 percent in areas in Jakarta.