Anganwadi Accelerator Programme

ANGANWADI ACCELERATOR PROGRAMME: System Strengthening Approach

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Anganwadi Accelerator Programme: System Strengthening Approach works in partnership with the Integrated Child Development Schemes (ICDS) to reach highly-prone malnutrition areas. Scientifically accurate, contextual knowledge is made accessible for all stakeholders – ensuring adoption of best practices for long-term change.

There are over a million Anganwadi workers (government childcare workers) who work with about 70 million mothers and children across the country to prevent malnutrition. They are employed under the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). However, Anganwadi workers have too many tasks, too little support. Anganwadis ensure basic health care services including family planning, nutrition education and supplementation, as well as pre-school education. They have uneven knowledge and skills and irregular schedule of daily activities to conduct the tasks. Moreover, they are not adequately supported on the field to conduct these tasks. This leads to uneven execution of the First 1000 days programme with suboptimal results. Our Anganwadi Accelerator Programme works towards improving the capacity and capability of the Anganwadi system, and ensures sustained reduction of malnutrition by building agency and support for mothers in the first 1000 days.

We are working with the Women and Child Development department (WCD) in Chhatarpur and Rajgarh (Madhya Pradesh), Tumkur in Karnataka and in Kurla in Mumbai. We have trained over 50 to 75 frontline workers in Chhatarpur and Kurla, providing improved services to over 3,000 families in each of these locations – 6K+ families. Early indicators show that 70% of Anganwadi workers are doing at least 2 home visits per day and there has been a 10% increase in the number of screening of children using digital weighing scale and infantometers in the Anganwadi Accelerator Programme Anganwadis. Our team supports the frontline workers with field visits and feedback as well as sharing the data of top performing Anganwadi workers with their supervisors and the district officials every week. This serves as motivation for them to perform better. This year we aim to scale this programme across the district and increase the reach to 70,000 families.