The Roles of Public Health Service through OMABA Cooking Centre for Managing Malnourished and Stunting Children

Summary

Bandung is the second largest city of Indonesia with a population of 1,699,719 people. The Riung Bandung Public Health Service proposed an initiative in an attempt to overcome the challenges of malnourished and stunting children and to reduce stunting rate and mortality.

Background and Objective

The initiative adopts strategies to ensure that the supplementary food is not only conveyed to the targeted children, but also totally eaten up without compulsion, such as to improve the taste in addition to nutrition of the processed food. The food is delivered to target children with motorcycle taxis by women organization. The initiative has directly improved a nutritional status of children under-five in the pilot district. Malnourished children status decreased from 29 cases in 2013 to 0 cases in 2019. The initiative also has facilitated its members, who are almost females, with food producing skill and entrepreneurship passion. The initiative is innovative because it goes beyond the conventional programs of supplementary food distribution, which have led to mismatch between supply and demand due to government limitations and agency loss in bureaucracy. By developing community-based cooking centre that empowered local communities in handling malnutrition, processing healthy food, as well as conveying the food to children, the initiative succeeded in reducing the prevalence rate of malnourished and stunting children. The TC recommends this initiative to the Guangzhou Award because it presents an excellent example of local/subnational government stepping in to fill and redress central government failures with particular attention to children and their access to food/nutrition, based on community participation, involving women organization. This is the equivalent of town planners thinking about addressing the last mile - identifying that last, smallest, but often most important link between people and the services they need. The food chain is as good as its connection to those who need the food.