Nurturing nutritional change: Poshan champions
In southern Nepal, through an adolescent nutrition initiative, young people are actively promoting good nutrition and leading change in their home, schools and communities
Sarlahi, Nepal: Every day, Sandhya Sah – ninth grader at the Shree Chakra Janata Secondary School in Barahathawa Municipality in Sarlahi District in southern Nepal – enters the school premises with a bag full of books and a lunch box in hand. This box contains a wonderful homemade meal, prepared with great love by her mother. Anticipation fills Sandhya as she looks forward to sharing her food with all her friends.
“Ever since I joined the School Health and Nutrition Club, I’ve stopped relying on processed packaged foods,” Sandhya says. “Club members make an effort to bring homemade lunches and also share these with friends who haven’t brought their own lunch.”
“I won’t ever go back to opening a packet of noodles for the day.”
Sandhya was among the young people who were engaged in Project POSHAN – a school and community-based adolescent nutrition initiative being implemented by UNICEF in partnership with the Government of Nepal, NORAD and SOCHAI. Under the project, adolescents from grades 7, 8 and 9 in three municipalities in Sarlahi District took part in four-day nutrition bootcamps to learn about and co-create solutions for nutrition challenges.
Over 250 adolescents have been trained so far across five schools and five communities.
Post training, the young people have been actively working to promote nutrition and lead change in their homes, schools and communities. These Poshan Champions – as they call themselves – have formed School Health and Nutrition Clubs with 25 members each. Collaborating closely with school authorities, they have been organizing monthly programmes in their respective schools.
What’s more, these adolescents make sure to infuse creativity into their initiatives to reach more of their friends with their messages. One club member, for example, uses poetry as a medium to talk about the intricacies and importance of good nutrition in adolescence, while others have organized informative street dramas.
These efforts are aimed at both changing mindsets and behaviour among adolescents themselves, as well as urging school administration to restrict access to unhealthy food within and around the school premises.
“I used to have a lot of stomach issues in the past – they were often so bad I had to miss classes,” says Mohammad Jyahul, another bootcamp participant. “Since the bootcamp, I’ve realized it was because of the junk food I was eating. After I changed my habits, I haven’t had stomach problems.”
Aiding these Poshan Champions in their quest are the Junior Volunteers, comprising members of the same community who are able to play the role of mentors for the club members. Meetings between the two groups are held every month, during which plans are made for a variety of activities to follow in the coming weeks, whether speech competitions or quizzes or other events.
In the case of Sandhya and her fellow club members at Shree Chakra Janata, they are grateful for the guidance that Rajiv Mahato and Shiv Kumari (Shivani) Thakur have provided them. Rajiv and Shivani’s support has also been crucial in the club’s success in ramping up the weekly iron folic acid (IFA) supplementation campaign in the school, which had been dormant for some time. Thanks to club members’ advocacy and awareness-raising work, adolescent girls in the school have been taking the IFA tablets regularly.
Teachers at the school are astounded by the visible changes in their students since their involvement in the nutrition initiative. “The impact has been very tangible, in our perspective,” says Ram Bahadur Rai Yadav, principal at Shree Chakra Janata.
“Not only has their participation in the programme brought about a big change in their relationship to and understanding of food and their eating habits, it has also instilled them with a lot more confidence to speak up than before and empowered them to ask for their rights.”
