Digital Didi Changing Mindsets, Practices and Narratives
POSHAN Abhiyaan is the Government’s flagship programme to improve nutritional standards among pregnant women, lactating mothers, infants, children and adolescents. In an effort to amplify the scheme’s reach in rural India through digitisation, UNICEF and DEF have collaborated to organise community dialogues in 10 states which has four phases to it. In the ongoing implementation phase, POSHAN Preraks are on the verge of completing the community dialogues. At this juncture, MeraApp has played a key contribution to the project as The POSHAN Preraks use it to assess the impact of their sessions in 187 villages across India.
The amplification through UNICEF and DEF is taking place in 10 states — Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Odisha, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal with the help of 200 POSHAN Preraks.
The project is based on Community Dialogue on the themes of Prime Minister’s flagship programme of POSHAN Abhiyaan, implemented by UNICEF in association with Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF). The project is divided in four phases. The short term four month long project had a month long planning phase (November’18) including a brief training phase as well (December’18), post which the project at present is in its Implementation phase that has a span of two months (February’19-March’19). Further, there would be an upcoming Reporting phase (April’19).
In the implementation phase, the POSHAN Preraks are on the verge of completing the community dialogue on the various key themes as laid down in the Guidelines of POSHAN Abhiyaan. The in-house app of DEF, MeraApp, has played in a key role in the project. The Poshan Preraks are using it to assess the impact of their sessions in 187 villages across India.
In the month of March, the project’s half of eight week long session plan is successfully completed. The POSHAN Preraks in locations such as Nuh, Ghazipur, Barabanki, Bharatpur, Alwar, Guna, Hoshangabad, Visakhapatnam, Kanchipuram, Bargarh, Darbhanga, Ranchi and Murshidabad are responsible for disseminating the key messages on the larger topic of curbing malnutrition in India, in the form of day long sessions via the usage of the communication material curated by UNICEF. The participants in these sessions are mostly women and children of these locations’ rural belts.
In the current phase, information is being shared by these POSHAN Preraks on a wide-scale which they had received via the trainings that they received by their master trainers in the previous month. In a decentralised manner the information catering to four larger target beneficiary groups is being trickled down covering pregnant women, lactating mothers and her new born, children and adolescent. These target groups are being catered to in order to break the cycle of malnutrition existing in the country, thereby to bring malnutrition down from 38% to 25%.
Related posts
