Raah Foundation and Virat Kohli Foundation launched Project Bloom to improve nutrition of children from tribal Maharashtra. India is infamous for its serious hunger and climate change is likely to further worsen its undernutrition levels.
Raah Foundation is among winners of India CSR Palghar CSR Awards 2020 for Village Development.
Children especially under the age of 5 years are worst affected and lag behind in growth milestones leaving them to suffer for the rest of their lives. The situation is that of crisis and needs an immediate redressal.
Every third child in Maharashtra is malnourished. Malnourishment has a disastrous consequences and the child grows with muscular dysfunction, continued weakness, stuntedness over and above several other health issues impending a normal life.
What is needed is to provide nutritionally rich, fortified high protein food to children in the age group of 6 months to 6 years each day for a one year period. This can improve the weight of the child. Consistent year long nutrition supplementation can have a sustainable and visible impact on the health of the child. Over a period of one year we can look forward to several sustainable outcomes like increased weight and possible reduction in incidence of malnutrition and stunting.
Raah Foundation will in collaboration with the District Administration will select anganwadis’ with most SAM and MAM children in Mokhada and Jawhar and provide them with fortified yet tasty nutritious snacks every day and monitor the change and improvement in the children.
This project is expected to have several long term non tangible impact over and above the expected tangible impact mentioned above. These include improvement in attendance of the children, improvement in energy levels etc.
The project will be completely executed locally involving procurement of raw material from the local vendors, training and capacity building of local tribal women to execute the project as well as honing the skills of Anganwadi sevika. This would have multi pronged, multi level benefits on the rural economy.
