Fund nutritious meals for a construction worker child by Mobile Creches for Working Mothers' Children

Mobile Creches' (MC) runs a day-care program for children of migrant labourers working in construction sites across Delhi NCR (Gurgaon, Ghaziabad, Noida). The centres focus on health, nutrition and education of these children.

The nutrition program provides fresh balanced diet to the children. Each centre on an average has 60 children a year of which 70% are severely malnourished when they come to the centre for the first time. With the nutrition program, MC strives to bring them back to normal health. The day-care centre provides them three meals a day, including breakfast, lunch and a snack before going home. The meals are nutritionally dense comprising mainly of khichdi, dalia etc.

Malnourished children are further provided with supplementary nutrition of eggs and bananas. For those more severely malnourished (Grades 3 and 4), the frequency of feeding is increased by 3-4 times a day with a special low-cost, locally made, ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) of rice, wheat and chickpea (chana).

Staples like cereals and pulses are supplied by MC to the day-care centres. Perishable items like milk, fruits and vegetables are purchased locally by the centre staff to ensure freshness. The food is cooked in each centre by a trained staff, which is also trained for teaching these kids.

Mobile Creches do monthly assessment of the outcomes through a growth-monitoring exercise to ensure proper implementation of their initiative. One of the studies conducted by them have found out that 75% of children in the age-group 0-3 years and 73% of children in the age-group 3-6 years have either retained or come up to normal nutritional grade if stayed with MC for at least six months.