Reducing chronic childhood malnutrition

Reduced chronic malnutrition (also referred to as "stunting") is one of CARE's main measures of success for our work in food and nutrition security. As a proxy for many aspects of well-being, freedom from stunting reflects success on many fronts: food systems, health systems, education, WASH infrastructure, and safety nets, to name a few. Since it arises during the first 1,000 days - from conception through the child's second birthday - and essentially cannot be reversed thereafter, prevention by ensuring adequate growth and nutritional status is critical for the fulfilment of rights, across people's whole lifetime. CARE's programming thus promotes the integration of nutrition-sensitive approaches into our work in WASH, economic development, food security, education and health, to provide the foundations for good nutrition. We also focus on maternal and adolescent nutrition, as important outcomes in their own right, and for the nutritional status of their children in the future, should they choose to have any. Given the imbalance in domestic and care work between women and men, CARE promotes a gender-transformative approach to nutrition, engaging with men and boys to recognize, reduce and redistribute domestic work, to help reduce women's time poverty, and increase the quality of time spent on child feeding and stimulation.

Some programs additionally focus on nutrition-specific approaches that address the immediate determinants of fetal, child, and maternal nutrition and development. These programs focus on the key home-based practices that produce good nutrition outcomes, and as such they employ social and behavior change strategies to encourage the adoption of these behaviors, including access to supplements, such as Iron Folate, Vitamin A, or Zinc, or Micronutrient Powders (MNPs). In our programs CARE and partners implement an integrated model, developed through 10 years of programming across multiple countries, where key nutrition-sensitive interventions support a core nutrition-specific behavior-based approach, ensuring not only the promotion of improved nutrition practices but also helping to provide the necessary foundation for adopting them. This integrated model is grounded in the interventions endorsed in the 2013 Lancet nutrition series.