One of our biggest wins comes from our nutrition campaigns held in villages across several states of India.
We have been blessed to have nutrition experts come and train our staff who are working in remote villages. With that training we have been able to teach rural women the importance of nutrition. We also organized awareness walks to promote the significance of healthy eating habits and physical activity. In our schools, we held essay and art competitions to engage students in learning about healthy food choices.
The Global Hunger Index Report of 2023, ranked India 107th among 121 countries, highlighting malnutrition as a major cause of death across the country. Women and children, especially girls are most vulnerable when it comes to nutrition due to poverty, low wages and limited access to diverse and nutritious food options. Most rural Indian women are anemic, particularly the economically poor.
Food security remains a serious concern for India. Despite being the world’s second-largest food producer, India has the most undernourished people. It’s a surprising fact that rural women all too often must travel out of their villages to shop and end up paying much higher prices for very small amounts of food.
Hope found in the kitchen garden
Teaching women about nutrition is meaningless if they have no way to acquire healthy food. So KGF has begun teaching women how to grow and maintain kitchen vegetable gardens. If we can help them understand the value of growing their own fruits and vegetables, and we teach them basic growing techniques, we can reduce malnutrition and anemia.
Already 1,592 women including children and their families have benefitted through these initiatives in the last year. Around 107 Kitchen Garden kits have been given out. Each kit contains seeds of tomato, chilli, coriander, fenugreek, spinach, radish, carrot, beet root, cauliflower, cabbage, brinjal and fruits saplings like, papaya, banana and chikoo. Our community staff continues to encourage women to have nutritional kitchen gardens and provide instructions on how to maintain them so that they can receive fresh vegetables all year and live a healthy lifestyle.
One mother shared with the staff how her and her family were spending money on processed food with very little nutritional value. She was concerned because her children were continually getting sick. This mom learned not only about good nutrition
but even more importantly, how to start and maintain her own vegetable garden.
Many of the women are doing so well with their gardens that they are able to sell their produce in their village. This is a BIG WIN!