The Infant and Young Child Nutrition Project

Mamorena Namane has lived in rural Lesotho all her life. As a child, she saw her mother, a community health worker, care for other children who were malnourished or sick. In Lesotho, malnutrition is a fact of life, and more than one-third of children under five years old are small for their age and prone to illness. Mamorena watched her own first child grow up weak and sickly.

When Mamorena became pregnant for a second time, she reached out for help—to the PATH-led Infant and Young Child Nutrition (IYCN) Project. Trained as a community health worker, Mamorena entered an IYCN workshop to learn more about infant nutrition, including the importance of breastfeeding and the consequences of certain ingrained cultural practices, like delaying breastfeeding for as long as a week after birth. She applied those lessons to her own life and began carrying them to her neighbors.

Through her mother, Mamorena knows the impact one person can have and is committed to changing the way her community thinks about feeding its children. She’s made it her mission to show families how to keep their children healthy, even with the limited resources available to households in her community. And her second child—a big, healthy son who was breastfed from the day of birth—is a visible symbol of the impact of those simple changes.

PATH and our partners are giving children a chance for a healthy and productive life through the IYCN Project. Our goal is to prevent malnutrition and improve nutrition for mothers, infants, and young children by intervening before it’s too late.

A window of hope

Good nutrition early on is the foundation for a healthy and productive life as an adult. Children who get adequate nutrients during the first two years of life are more likely to be healthy and complete their schooling—and even perform better while they are in school. The benefits last into adulthood; well-nourished children earn more money as adults and thus are in a better position to have healthy, well-nourished children themselves. It’s a cycle of stability.

Many children can be saved through low-cost measures to improve nutrition practices early in life.

Without proper nutrition, children suffer devastating consequences: more frequent and more serious childhood illnesses, stunted physical and mental development, even death. Undernourished children are far more likely to die from common illnesses like diarrhea and pneumonia. Malnutrition is an underlying cause of more than one out of every three child deaths in poor countries each year—and a major contributor to the burden of disease worldwide.

Nutritional problems that start early continue for a lifetime—and can affect future generations too. Mothers who were malnourished as children are more likely to have babies who are too small—and infants born too small are more likely to die before the age of five and may be more vulnerable to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes as adults.

But during the critical window between birth and age two—as an infant becomes a toddler—there is an opportunity to turn a child’s life around.

Saving lives through national and community efforts

Many children can be saved through low-cost measures to improve nutrition practices early in life. Through the IYCN Project, PATH is working around the world to promote and support these practices. Our activities include training health care workers and community volunteers to provide much-needed support for mothers as well as advocating for improved national nutrition policies:

• In Lesotho, we are bringing together government workers for the first time to deliver consistent information and supporting community health workers, home economists, and teachers in helping families improve nutrition.
• In Zambia, we’re developing new fortified supplementary foods to help improve the diet of mothers and children who use HIV prevention services.
• In Madagascar, we are developing a national strategy to improve the nutrition of mothers.
• To make sure the global health community has access to resources and information, we’ve created the IYCN website.

Early nutrition interventions prevent malnutrition, saving and improving lives.

Photo: Christine Demmelmaier.