Teachers and the schools they work in are the critical link to the community itself. By embarking on a nutrition promotion programme within the school, both through words and actions, the school community can collectively back up the benefits of the Primary School Nutrition Programme, and assist community members to play a part in their children’s health. Some steps towards doing so could include:
– Hold a participatory workshop for parents about the importance of
nutrition, without setting impossible food-provision targets for them.
– Explore the possibility of unemployed parents starting a food garden on the school premises. Make the food garden a learning resource for classes.
– Encourage children to eat breakfast before school, and guide them in making sensible food choices. Children, but particularly adolescents who are often responsible for their own nutrition, need to know the consequences of poor nutrition.
– Initiate an annual Diet and Nutrition Day when children can invite their parents and younger siblings to school. It is especially important that under-five-year-old children attend, as they are most at risk of stunting from inadequate nutrition. One of the activities could involve school children in measuring their siblings’ weights in relation to age. In this way, older children and parents can be made aware of the risk of stunting; at the same time, these data can be used to teach school children number skills by, for example, plotting weight on to a growth card. Through this process, teachers will also become aware of the prevalence of under-nutrition in that area.
– Develop a questionnaire that older children can administer to their families and neighbours with questions relating to nutrition-related chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension. They could also find out what food types their family members have eaten in the past 24 hours. The results of their research could then be analysed in class. In this way, research becomes education, and the family and neighbourhood situation is used as a learning environment.