Growing healthy from community nutrition club

"My youngest child, Hieu, was nearly two years old, and increasingly malnourished," says Huong, 36, a mother of three, living in Nong Son mid-land district, Quang Nam province. “At that time I attended the first meeting where mothers discussed setting up a nutrition club with World Vision’s assistance in our village,” she reveals. “Hieu looked like a tiny bottle when she was born. She weighed two-and-a-half kilos, underweight by half of kilo as a normal newborn,” she adds. After staying seven days at the commune health station, Huong carried her newborn child home. The rainy season had just begun. The road home, sticky with mud, seemed longer as she was worrying about the coming between-crop period. As a farmer and mother, she had more reasons for her anxieties. Her two sons, a 1st grader and a 5th grader, needed pens, notebooks and new clothes for their new school year. There was only a handful of rice left in the earthen jar in the kitchen. Again, she and her husband had to borrow rice to eat. Then, they would pay back to lenders with money they earned by working as hired hands on another’s farmland. Huong’s family has neither an inch of ground for planting rice, nor farmland for cash crops. She and her husband work as tenants for 700-square-metre rice field of her parents-in-law. Floods come to her village almost every year. The wide river, the main water resource for daily use during the dry season, becomes dangerous for the village on rainy days. When the river rises, villagers have to evacuate their children to schools on higher ground. Four years ago, World Vision and local partners noticed the struggle of Huong’s family, and others in the community. This is how Huong and 17 other mothers first began to talk about establishing a nutrition club in their village. The nutrition club now includes 26 mothers and caregivers having children under five. The club members participate in monthly meetings on every second day of the month. At the meetings, the mothers receive training on childcare, hygiene, prevention of common diseases, vegetable gardening, and cooking nutritious meals for their children with home-grown products. Huong also received a breeding cow to improve her family’s livelihood two years ago. They share the cow with another family. "If my family hadn’t received support from World Vision, my husband and I would still be struggling, working on someone else's farmland,” said Huong. "Rearing cows is now our livelihood. We have a six-month-old calf. Cows are money for my family and our children’s education,” she adds with a smile. “My child, Hieu, has escaped malnutrition since I’ve applied the learning from our nutrition club. She will enter Grade 1 in the coming new school year. My child has grown healthy from our community nutrition club,” she proudly says. The nutrition club has also run a self-managed credit scheme to improve club members’ household economics. Each member contributes 10,000 dong (about 47 US cents) as a funding pool for revolving loans. They use small loans without interest to make their living by planting cash crops and rearing poultry. Borrowers pay back the loans to the club in due time by selling their homegrown products. Rural mothers have chance not only to sustain their children’s nutrition and home economics but also support each other to overcome poverty with community ownership. Huong is one of over 600 mothers from 24 community nutrition clubs supported by the World Vision’s Nong Son Development Programme. By the end of 2013, the percentage of malnourished children in her community was down to 19%, a 5% decrease from four years ago.