Survey reveals why rural women offer biscuits to their children for breakfast

Members of Jagruti Mahila Okkoota, conducting a door-to-door survey of eating habits in some villages in Karnataka’s Belagavi district, found that women gave their children biscuits and tea for breakfast while they ate roti or rice before dinner. feel. out for work

A simple intervention—asking mothers to replace crackers with homemade roti or rice—has gone a long way toward ensuring children receive better nutrition.

Simple adjustments of this kind, made by the group of volunteer women working in the health field, are part of a campaign to combat malnutrition among children in 30 villages in Karnataka’s Belagavi district. They are raising awareness of malnutrition among mothers by organizing village mothers’ meetings, interacting with anganwadi workers and training mothers to prepare nutritious food for their children using readily available material.

In the first phase, activists went door-to-door to conduct a survey of malnourished children. Around 30 activists from Okkoota have been working in 30 villages in Kittur and Khanapur taluks for nine months. About 800 children were included in the survey, targeting families from marginal, landless and other oppressed communities.

Malnourished children were categorized using the WHO growth chart that establishes parameters based on age, height, and weight.

Severely malnourished children were identified and their mothers counselled. Teachers and workers in the anganwadis these children attended were also involved.

Sharada Gopal, co-founder, said a big challenge was combating misconceptions about nutrition, such as the belief that store-bought foods have more nutritional value.

“Most believed that extra nutrition came from buying expensive items. We had to tell them that it was all about rearranging meal times and the balance between grains, vegetables and dairy,” says Rajeshwari Joshi, another activist.

Activists trained some mothers to make peanut and brown sugar laddus. These women, in turn, trained others, resulting in increased awareness against junk food.

Impact of the intervention

Apart from the intervention tools, the project produced two interesting findings: Children who had received 2-3 eggs per week did not show malnutrition. The State Government supplies two eggs per week.

The team found that malnutrition levels were almost the same across categories, such as the gender of the child, the educational level of the mothers, and caste. It was discovered that all poor children suffered from this disease.

A follow-up survey revealed that the intervention had significant effects.

In the first survey, 106 of the sample size of 410 children were found to be severely malnourished in Khanapur taluk. But this dropped to 57 at the end of nine months of intervention. In Kittur taluk, 62 of 360 children were severely malnourished. This number dropped to 30 at the end of the same period.

“Our effort was to explore local remedies that a poor rural woman could find using the resources readily available to her,” said Gopal Dabde, co-founder of the group.

The children’s powder is used as feed for cows.

Jagruti Mahila Okkoota found that most of the packages of ‘Pushti’, a nutritional supplement that families with young children receive every month as an Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme, were being given to cows and buffalo. The households explained that every time they gave the powder to the children, they suffered from diarrhoea.

The powder is supplied from the time the child is six months old until he or she is over 40 months old.

Rajeshwari Joshi says, “We found that the nutritional supplement mix had coarse groundnut powder that was difficult for young children to digest. We ask them to use it after sifting the fine powder. We also teach them how to make Chikkis using the thick mix.”