Spotlight on SAM: The Children’s Nutrition Program of Haiti
Much like MANA, The Children’s Nutrition Program of Haiti focuses on mothers’ participation in the health of their children. The CNP utilizes the Hearth Program, a low-cost nutritional model designed to rehabilitate moderately to severely malnourished children. The program is based on “positive deviance,” wherein the CNP looks at poor mothers who have managed to maintain the health of their children, and uses their successful recipes and behaviors to teach other mothers.
Since its inception in 2000, the CNP’s Hearth Program has spread to numerous villages in Haiti. The CNP trains locals to run the programs and collect information on the health of children in every household in the community. If a child is found to be malnourished, his or her caregiver is invited to participate in a Hearth. For two weeks, mothers learn through poems and songs and discover how to feed their children nutritious meals using locally available and affordable foods.
Unfortunately, there are children in the community who are too severely malnourished to respond to the Hearth. In this case, the CNP sends the children and their mothers home with RUTF as participants in an outpatient therapeutic food program, with weekly returns for evaluations. We’re glad to see that in Haiti, RUTF brings another good news story about malnutrition.
Learn more about the Children’s Nutrition Program of Haiti, here.