Grassroots health and nutrition campaigns are crucial in building awareness of nutrition, health, and WASH at both the service seeker and provider levels. Adopting a community-based approach, PPEPP-EU sensitises its members and the larger community to improve nutrition, food habits, and healthcare through organising campaigns and community events.
The PPEPP-EU project is now organising ‘Nutrition Fairs’ across its 145 working unions with a high poverty rate. The day-long event is coordinated by the members of two social platforms formed under the PPEPP-EU project- the ‘Social Development Centre or SDC’ (adolescent girls and boys) and the ‘Mother and Child Forum’.
Nutrition Fair is a first-of-its-kind event organised under the project to create mass awareness of good health, food and nutrition practices among the PPEPP-EU members, their family members and the local community using a single platform.
The event offers multiple activities to the participants, focusing on displaying diversified nutritious food, proper cooking processes and cost-free nutritional and primary health care services for adolescent girls, mothers, and children.
Participants at the fair observe various nutritious food sources displayed over a food pyramid (raw and cooked food), the ideal food cooking process for people of different age groups in the family, and proper hand-wash techniques before and after meals.
At the event, participants are also sensitised on the importance of nutritious food intake, sanitary napkin usage, vaccination and IFA tablet intake for adolescent girls and receive general health and nutrition services such as nutritional status measurement. Besides, adolescent girls and boys participate in health and nutrition-related quizzes, essays, poster-making, and sports competitions.
‘I am so happy to be a part of the Pushti Mela (Nutrition Fair). We went through many activities the whole day, and the response from the community was amazing,’ said Nurunnahar Akter (17), an SDC member from the Southkhali union in Bagerhat.
The event is expected to bring diversity to the household’s typical food habits, grow interest in nutritious food intake, and help reduce the inter-generational cycle of malnutrition.