Vietnam: community nutrition clubs a proven model for a healthy future

By Tran My Hang, communication officer, World Vision Vietnam

For children to be healthy they must receive the right food. Unfortunately, many parents lack the knowledge and information about nutrition to meet their children’s needs. A doctor in Vietnam, Dr Nguyen Anh Vu, decided this wasn’t good enough and did something about it.

After working on community-based approaches to maternal and child health for a number of years, Dr Vu started to focus specifically on the issue of poor nutrition.

In 2010, Dr Vu joined World Vision Vietnam and facilitated the rapid implementation of ‘nutrition clubs’. These clubs seek to improve the knowledge of mothers and caregivers within the community about childhood nutrition as well as to provide opportunities for families to improve their livelihood.

Twenty-four year old Mui is now an active participant in one of these nutrition clubs. ‘During my pregnancy, I learned from the nutrition club that I must be fed adequately so my child would be born healthy in full weight,’ she says.

When her child was three months old, Mui started planting vegetables and raising poultry on her farming plots. She timed her activities to make sure she would have the right balance of nutrition for her child after six months of exclusive breastfeeding.

‘Our nutrition club has three meetings each month,’ Mui says. ‘It gives young mothers like me more chances to learn about each other’s experiences of caring for children and livelihood improvement,’ she adds. ‘Now my daughter is nearly nine months old. She weighs 7.8 kilos. She would not have had such growth if I did not join the nutrition club in my village. In my garden I have vegetables, chickens, ducks and eggs. I am also able to bring some to market for more family income, in addition to the money my husband earns casually by repairing electrical appliances,’ the young mother beams.

Today, there are 521 nutrition clubs across 14 provinces in Vietnam, reaching approximately 17,000 children under the age of 5. Since World Vision started working in Mui’s community, just over three years ago, the child malnutrition rate has dropped from 31 per cent to 17 per cent. Malnutrition is a contributing factor in around 40 per cent of all under 5 child deaths. Community-based nutrition and livelihood education and training are key to tackling this issue. If we want all children to ‘Survive 5’, we must improve childhood nutrition.

Dr Vu, who is the national co-ordinator for health at WV Vietnam, collaborates closely with the National Institute of Nutrition to advocate for the nutrition club approach and to develop nutrition guidelines, training materials and tools to prevent and manage child malnutrition. He was one of 14 shortlisted ‘2013 nutrition champions’ selected by the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement, a major global collective seeking to improve nutrition, especially amongst children under 5. You can find out more about SUN here.