Nutrition: The connect between Health and Education

  

Over 49% of our children are malnourished. While a lot is being done to educate our children, there is very little awareness for this education to have the right impact. The child needs to receive a basic amount of nutrition in order to be healthy. 

In the article “Malnutrition: India’s Silent Catastrophe”, Moin Qazi, a developmental Journalist, quotes:
 

“Undernourishment can lower a child’s IQ, increase the risk of diet-related non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart diseases, and reduce productivity. Going by NFHS-4 results, it appears that 40 percent of our future workforce will be unable to achieve its full physical and cognitive potential. The World Bank estimates this to cost India’s economy $12 billion a year in higher healthcare spending and lost productivity. The well-known economist Dean Spears says the price of all this is far greater than the costs of fixing it.”

Hence, there is an urgency for us as fellow citizens to do everything in our capacity to fix this problem, understanding this exclusive stress on nutrition.

 



Vision for the Country

 
As part of We-Mana’s mission, We-Mana aims to encourage women at the village level by providing awareness and training on nutrition and entrepreneurship. Thereby, a space is being created to empower women to be educated about health; set up production units in their own homes/localities; manufacture nutrition ladoos from locally available ingredients; sell it among their own communities; and become informed, robust entrepreneurs themselves.