Project Overview

Development programs aimed at helping the poor from the cycle of Poverty, poor health conditions and other basic services have put a lot of effort for decades on strategies that can create effective, efficient, and sustainable programs that meet the needs of the people in the poverty trap and enable them to stand out for themselves to overcome the day-to-day problems they are facing.

Healthy dietary practices and behaviors at an early age will lead to healthy childhood and thereby lifelong health.   A balanced and nutrient-dense diet provides children with essential nutrients for optimal growth and development, while diets with imbalanced or inadequate nutrients may lead to insufficient nutrient intake or overweight, which affects health and performance in childhood as well as in adulthood.  More importantly, children’s dietary practices and behaviors may be tracked to adulthood, potentially influencing health status during adulthood.

This structured approach guarantees active community involvement, meaningful engagement with stakeholders, and the implementation of evidence-based strategies.

Implementation science will be used to scale up evidence-based strategies in nutrition intervention suggested in national guidelines by the care group approach (mother’s club) with active community participation, evidence based behavioral change in communication to enhance the sustainability, scalability, fidelity and penetration.

General objective

To develop, implement, and evaluate a nutrition intervention package to manage undernutrition among under 5 year old children in the northern province of Sri Lanka

Specific Objectives

  • To establish a stakeholder consultation group (SCG)
  • To evaluate existing care pathways and clinical guidelines and identify stakeholder priorities for improvement.
  • To develop and implement a stakeholder-designed nutrition intervention package
  • To evaluate the nutrition intervention package through a cluster randomized controlled trial