Educational Program

Lucy Kathuri-Ogola of Kenyatta University in Kenya will train young people to be outreach youth champions to support local smallholder farming households with low food security in Kenya by teaching them new agricultural practices and building financial and social support networks. They will develop a mobile phone application and training platform and test their approach in selected rural and urban areas in Kenya where many smallholder farming families rely heavily on food relief.

LTP CBT program (LTP+) supports enhanced parental awareness of developmental milestones and improvements in school readiness. There is a pictorial calendar for parents which depicts 8 successive stages of CD, from birth to 3 years, & illustrations of parent-child play & other activities that promote parental involvement, learning, and attachment. The calendar is accompanied by a training manual for non-specialist health care providers, with additional information on CD and techniques for conducting group sessions with parents using the calendar as a focus.

A model to train and supervise all actors engaged in humanitarian response to deliver Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT) to refugees and members of the host population suffering from common mental disorders and post traumatic stress. The team will develop and test a train-the-trainer and supervision systems for delivery of IPT to health workers working under the Syrian crisis response, as well as implement systematic tracking of adoption/dissemination indicators on the level of provider, supervisor, and organization.

We address the health challenge of provision of orthotic care to children under 5 years of age, who suffer from skeletal deformities. We aim to remedy the congenital condition of clubfoot and postnatal early-onset scoliosis, through the use of orthotic devices fabricated by 3D printing. If left untreated in young children, such skeletal deformities can grow to become a major handicap, preventing persons from full participation in society due to lack of employment, and due to the stigma of deformity.

The primary purpose of the innovation is to build social and healthcare capacities for improving reproductive health outcomes for young women in two states. It takes to scale a pilot that is implemented and tested by IDF in two blocks of Jharkhand, India. Using a youth-focused communication strategy, designed and implemented by young women from the community, the innovation will build upon IDF’s efforts in the public health system of two states to increase availability of SRH services, including abortion and contraception.

In many children who are hospitalized in Africa with a severe infection (sepsis), the weeks following discharge are a period of great vulnerability. Indeed, as many die during the post-discharge period as die in hospital. Many post-discharge deaths are due to poorly resilient health systems that lack infrastructure and resources to identify at-risk children and provide effective interventions to ensure children remain healthy after discharge. Our project will transition a program of Smart Discharges to scale at several regional hospitals in Uganda.

The project will deliver Survive and Thrive in Brazil, a an evidence-based curriculum adapted for the Brazilian context to support caregivers delivered by a new cadre of specially trained workers called Child Development Agents (CDAs) that are exclusively focused on child development. The curriculum is an adaptation of Reach Up, an evidence- based program that includes detailed guidance and activities for CDAs for each interactions with parents, formalized training manuals, and toy making manuals.

In Kenya, 95% of fecal sludge is disposed into the environment without treatment. The reason for this is quite simple: municipalities are unable to pay to treat human waste because they lack cost-effective options. To solve this problem, we work with partners (local governments and refugee camps) to implement and operate waste processing factories. These factories intake fecal sludge and biomass residues to produce charcoal briquettes, that outperform traditional charcoal and save 88 trees per ton of product sold.

Worldwide, 50M people suffer from fluorosis, which affects teeth, bones, joints, and brain functions. In countries where manual labour is essential, fluorosis reduces mobility and thus affects livelihoods. In Sub-Saharan Africa, widespread malnutrition is compounded by fluorosis. 14M Ethiopians have fluorosis but defluoridation requires costly infrastructure. Diets rich in calcium (Ca) may reduce the severity of symptoms by binding fluoride (F). No attempt has been made to confirm this effect at the community level.

Learning Clubs is an integrated, evidence-based caregiver education program that addresses multiple major risk factors, including: maternal nutrition, infant health and development, gender-based violence and empowerment and maternal mental health to optimal early childhood development. Each of the program’s 19 community-based facilitated group sessions provide mothers, fathers, and grandparents with access to learning activities, group interaction, educational DVDs, and social support throughout the first 1000 days of a child’s development.