By Racha Yehia | Managing Director
Care 2 Communities is excited to kick off the new year by updating our GlobalGiving community on how your generous donations supported our malnutrition program in 2024 and how we’re working to reduce malnutrition in our communities in Haiti in the coming year!
With malnutrition an ever-increasing concern amid the ongoing political and social unrest in Haiti, your generous donations provide a key lifeline for families whose children are struggling with hunger. Thanks to your support of C2C via GlobalGiving, we screened 2,887 children for malnutrition between August and December 2024. Of these, 30 children were treated for severe malnutrition and 86 for moderate malnutrition. In total, fifty-eight children have fully recovered from their condition!
Because of your generous donations to “Healthy Futures for Haiti's Children,” C2C was able to provide these critical community and clinic-based malnutrition activities since our last report: bi-monthly nutritional activities and promotion of complementary foods for malnourished children in communities; systematic malnutrition screening for children ages 6 months to 5 years old, which is provided free of charge at C2C clinics; enhanced staff training on natural sources of vitamin A; distribution of educational materials on nutrition, as well as educational sessions and videos on nutrition and local foods to supplement the use of ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF); completed childhood immunizations of treated children; home visits for children who miss their scheduled appointments; and the distribution of 86 food kits!
As you can imagine, this work is not easy. Our community members continue to face persistent challenges that make daily life- even the most basic aspects like going to work, getting an education, and indeed, feeding their families - increasingly difficult. Widespread financial insecurity has plunged already vulnerable communities deeper into poverty. Rural and departmental migration has disrupted our staff’s efforts to follow up on critical malnutrition cases. Cultural barriers, such as superstitions and taboos, can impede important health practices that are necessary to get and keep children healthy. While C2C cannot solve all these issues at a structural level, we still hold ourselves to the highest standards of healthcare quality possible, using multiple strategies to form a comprehensive approach to malnutrition treatment and prevention:
With the support of our amazing GlobalGiving community, we will continue to work hard to improve our program in 2025 through constant supervision and monitoring. We have implemented continuous supervision sessions to assess our beneficiaries in the program, including random home visits for children who were previously admitted with severe malnutrition to ensure their long-term recovery. We encourage monthly visits for weight monitoring and continuous nutritional education. And importantly, we are increasing our community health team’s capacity by ensuring adherence to our high-quality standards, promoting active screening of new admissions, coordinating community-based care so that all families can have access to these critical services, and improving the reliability of our data through rigorous data collection and daily record-keeping.
At C2C, we know how important nutrition is for children and their families in the first few years of life. By giving children in Northern Haiti the strong start they deserve, we set them on a path to a healthy, long-term life. Thank you again for supporting “Healthy Futures for Haiti's Children”!
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By Rebecca Skala | Development Consultant
By Shanna U. | Communications Associate
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