Understanding malnutrition in India

Malnutrition is one of the largest factors supressing India's spectacular growth. In a country of lunar missions, billionaires, and nuclear power, a staggering 46% of all India children under 5 years old are still underweight. In India, where everything is on a large scale, malnutrition is daunting - an estimated 200 million children are underweight at any given time, with more than 6 million of those children suffering from the worst form of malnutrition, severe acute malnutrition. Experts estimate that malnutrition constitutes over 22% of India's disease burden, making malnutrition one of the nation's largest health threats.

The causes of malnutrition and therefore the solutions to the problem vary as much as the Indian people. To understand and solve malnutrition requires patience, nuance, flexibility, and above all determination.

Follow me as I set out to understand malnutrition in the subcontinent and begin to tackle it

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

the challenges of finding the right staff

Back to writing after a long hiatus filled with wrapping up 2009, starting up 2010 and even taking 2 days off!

Over the past two weeks I've been hard at work, banging my head against the wall at times, trying to scale-up our malnutrition program from one district, Jhabua, to 500 villages throughout 5 districts in Southwest Madhya Pradesh, Jhabua, Alirajpur, Khandwa, Khargone, and Barwani. This includes not only the standard, but painful process of getting the proper government permissions, streamlining financials, and finalizing training curriculums, but also the daunting task of hiring 55+ people to work with us on the ground.

We're excited about hiring our new staff, especially since most will be from the communities in Southwest MP who we're trying to help, so we will not only be serving communities with malnutrition identification, treatment, and prevention, but will also be empowering and uplifting cool local women.

Over the next series of entries I will write about the challenges, some predicted, but many unexpected of bringing on new local staff into a nutrition program

No comments:

Post a Comment