Anganwadi centres has been established by the Government of India, under its flagship program called Integrated Child Development Scheme which is also called Anganwadi Services, through which care and nutritional support to women and children from the marginalized communities. The child care and nutritional support provided to the children can be divided into two categories: Supplementary nutrition for the children aged between 7 months to 3 years and pre-school along with nutrition to the children aged between 3 years to 6 years. The centres also provide comprehensive nutrition services for the women in pre-natal and ante-natal period.
ANGA-CARE
ANGANWADI CENTERS
These facilities are similar to both the kindergarten and the “day care” and, in particular, they deal with
- Nutritional and recreational support to children aged from 0 to 6 years old
- Nutritional and sanitary- hygiene education Informal pre-school education
- Vaccination and sanitary check-upsC
- Sanitary assistance to pregnant women, new mothers and new-borns
- Although Anganwadi Centres play an extremely important role for the most vulnerable women and children of India, they are frequently unfit for use and dilapidated, and the present operators/ workers and teachers are not adequately educated or are not enough.
ANGACARE PROJECT
Although India is going through a strong economic growth, malnutrition is still present, with about 60 million children under the age of 5 suffering chronic malnutrition (more than the 30% of the world population). Besides, although education is the principal force of cultural and social promotion of every person, nowadays in India 23% of children living in the city, between 5-18 years old, does not attend school. We are talking about a great percentage, since it is about 23 millions of children not receiving any kind of school education.
SCOPE OF THE PROJECT
With this project, we want to enforce the role of Anganwadi in rural communities and in the most marginalized urban areas, in order to provide access to nutrition and sanitary services, thus contributing to the improvement of nutrition and health services for women and children and, at the same time, promote access to education.
We decided to support these important realities for communities, both in city slums and in the marginalized urban areas.
We support them through:
- Renovation and maintenance of rooms and toilets in which the free clinic/ consulting room is located, the kindergarten and the primary school.
- Construction of sanitary facilities and the sanitary securing.
- Promotion of training and update courses for workers/ operators and teachers
- Supply of school material
Improve Early Child Care and Childhood Development
The main effort is the support to the childhood development especially concerning the community:
- Making the Anganwadi Centre an efficient facility in intercepting the needs of the local community and a reporting location for families and children risking their exclusion from education
- Ensuring a nutritional support to children attending the Anganwadi
- Starting educational gardens that would integrate the nutrition of children attending the centres and that would be a lab for the diffusion of good practises for mothers of the community
- Promoting training courses on nutritional, hygiene and heath topics for young mothers and women attending the Anganwadi
