Healthier children, healthier futures
A partnership between Royal DSM, UNICEF and Sight and Life (SAL) seeks to deliver better nutrition to at-risk children and mothers in Nigeria and advocate the importance of increasing access to vital nutrients during the critical first 1,000 days of a child’s life for optimal physical and cognitive development. The partnership aims at creating an enabling policy environment and strengthening the capacity of governments to implement and scale-up micronutrient programs to help reduce deficiencies in children and women.
Inadequate and/or poor diet is one of the main reasons for high stunting and wasting rates in Nigeria, where only 34.5% of children in the 6-23-month age group meet the minimum dietary diversity needed to obtain adequate intake of micronutrients. This partnership focuses on implementation science and seeks to improve the impact of micronutrient interventions. Learn more about our collaboration in Nigeria which began in 2017 here.
Key details
- The Micronutrient Powder (MNP) program reaches 3,000,000 children in the 6-23-month age group
- As a result of this initiative, over 1 million children in the 6-59-month age group received MNP in 10 states of Nigeria.
- The number of Nigerian states that integrated MNP into their nutrition programs to improve dietary diversity went up from 10 to 24.
- The capacity of 300 government officials in Nigeria was built in MNP programing as part of Infant and Young Child Feeding or IYCF practices.
- Businesses now have enhanced capacity and are aware of regulatory and quality issues around complementary foods and other nutrients including MNP.
- Maternal Micronutrient Supplementation or MMS has been integrated into the micronutrient guidelines in Nigeria.
In India, this partnership works to support the government’s National Nutrition Mission through the unique public-private engagement: IMPAct4Nutrition (I4N). This first-of-its-kind platform engages with private sector companies from all over India to make commitments toward improving workplace nutrition and integrating nutrition into corporate social responsibility programs. As of November 2022, the initiative had 270+ partners who had engaged over 4 million employees and their families. The nutrition literacy outreach had touched 60 million people.
