1000 days - Education & Support for Mother & Child

A key part of the Dalit Freedom Network's projecct to transform the lives of mothers and their children are our Community Health Workers.  We have more than 100 CHWs around the nation delivering health, hygiene and preventative medical services to the poorest of the poor.

To give an example of the good work of these health workers, we take you to the North Indian state of Rajasthan.

We have five Community Health Workers working at DFN's Good Shepherd Schools. They each manage a minimum of around 150 students in their respective schools. These school children come from Lambadi and Harijan communities. Most of their parents in work as sweepers and labourers earning daily wages. The majority of the people are landless labourers and hence work in agricultural fields and herd sheep and goats. Their struggle to meet the basic needs of their family is real. Many of them have to support their elderly and extended family. The children in these school often face diarrhoea, stomach infections, fever, malnutrition, abdominal discomfort, malaria, and typhoid.

These difficult circumstances led our CHWs to step in with care to help treat the children. They gave talks to both the children and their parents about health and hygiene, hand washing, drinking clean water, good nutrition. They distributed deworming tablets periodically. The CHWs did vision screening tests for all the children. Gradual improvement was observed both in their health and in their studies.

Our Community Health Workers monitored all the children in the year 2018 in the following ways:

1. Recording of height, weight and general health of the children.
2. Imparted health education regarding clean drinking water, techniques of proper handwashing, simple remedies for head lice, dietary sources of Vitamin A, basic healthy nutrition, maintaining clean toilets and  home management  of diarrhoea.
3. Identification of the Immunisation status of all the children and immunisation of the unimmunized. Around 450 children were immunized.
4. Provided deworming tablets for every child in the school which helped reduce the incidence of reinfection in the children and thereby preventing them from anaemia and malnutrition.
5. Conducted Vision Testing on the Children once a year. 
6. The Health Workers also worked in various communities, particularly focusing on the health of pregnant mothers and young children. Within the communities, they acted as advocates for the Good Shepherd School. 

As a result of this move by the CHW’s around 754 children were given deworming tablets and had undergone the vision screening tests in Rajasthan.