More than 45 lakh underweight and stunted children were recorded in the Madhya Pradesh itself by the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4). Despite the fastest growing economy and the largest anti-malnutrition programme, India has the world’s worst level of child malnutrition.

Caritas India is implementing Sabal programme as a response to the chronic malnutrition prevailing among the Korku tribe of Khandwa district of Madhya Pradesh and Amravati district of Maharashtra to ensure food security and enhancing the nutrition status. The programme has completed 3 years of its implementation and is heading towards the 4^th year.

During the 3 years of the implementation, Sabal has increased the land coverage to 429 acres for traditional millet and food crop cultivation and transformed 1239 acres of land to sustainable agriculture with the support of collective farmers. 70% of child attendance has increased in Anganwadis after the introduction of Korku translated education materials and toys. 50,000 human days of work generated, and 600 soil water conservation structures constructed by the community reducing 40% migration among the community dwellers. In order to reflect on these past achievements and also to develop more concrete strategies to attain the laid objectives like diversification and strengthening food crop production, achieving protein sufficiency, functionalizing the public system and initiating people’s network and alliances for advocacy; three days “Annual Refresher” was organized from 29^th – 31^st May 2019 for all the Sabal staff.

Fr. Jayan Alex, Director KDSS in speech shared that we may not be able to transform all lives but we must never lose hope and continue to work for the task we have been chosen for. Mr. Robin George, Sabal Programme Manager shared the objectives and briefed the schedule of the three days programme.  Mr. Mukund Deshmukh, Sabal Asst. Programme Manager spoke in length about four broad objectives of the Sabal and expected outputs.

A group activity was conducted by Mr. Robin George to enhance the staff understanding of their job role. All the staff were divided based on their roles like Block Coordinators, Field Supervisor, and Nutrition Health Workers and conducted brainstorming discussion to identify their own key accountabilities and present it before all other participants for finalization. Mr. Robin also took the session on “Child Growth Monitoring strategies & implementation”. During the session, he shared the importance of monitoring and recording the child growth and its various stages which includes – appropriate methods of profiling the age, gender, weight, and height of the children and analysing to identify the status of children as ‘underweight’, ‘wasting’ and ‘stunting’. The application will support the NHWs in finding the status of every child at the tip of the fingers and will expedite the consolidation of the health status data without centralized analysis. Also, the NHWs can work more intensively to monitor the child health and capable of detecting early signs of malnutrition for saving more lives. The participants had practical hands on the anthro software for conducting child profiling. All the different groups shared their presentations on Mother & Childcare, Demystification of Malnutrition, Anganwadi Services, etc.

Mr. Mukund oriented the participants on food diversification and significance of millet promotion through Sabal. He also laid emphasis on strengthening and functionalizing of the Sabal collectives, linking them with various Government schemes and programme and setting up of various demo plots for sustainable agriculture promotion. Re-distribution of the poultry units and collective pisciculture (fish farming) in community ponds will be the main focus under ensuring protein sufficiency among the Korkus. Post lunch the Block Coordinators sat with their team to develop a detailed implementation plan for the next 7 months.

The Annual Refresher meeting of Caritas India invited Prof. AY Mohite, Regional Director  – Yashvantrao Chavhan Open University & Mrs. Vanita Raut, Coordinator Sant Gadge Baba University, Amravati to conduct a motivational session for the Sabal staff to develop their skills on the role of NGOs in Community Development for effective community mobilization. He also motivated the staff on developing their own skills and personality to working in an NGO setting.