Challenge
Worldwide, approximately 144 million children under five are stunted: too short for their age. Stunting causes long term mental and physical disabilities. These children perform worse at school, and face a higher risk of disease, unemployment and poverty in their life. This is unjust as stunting is preventable: It is caused by malnutrition, not just because of poor diet but also repeated infections from unsafe water and exposure to faecal matter from humans and animals.
Description
The Max Healthy Village approach mobilizes the entire community towards lasting sanitation, hygiene and nutrition behaviour change, because healthy children grow up in healthy communities. We do this by engaging households, entrepreneurs and local government, and we make sure it lasts by empowering them to continue beyond the end of the programme. To create a living environment for children to grow up healthy, we target key WASH, nutrition and essential care behaviours.
Outcomes
Lives impacted: 1,199,308 across 1,600 villages in Bangladesh and 400,000 people in Ethiopia.
