Amway India’s ‘Power of 5’ Program Creates Remarkable Positive Impact on the State of Malnourished Children

By Samachar Vishesh News

New Delhi 12^th September:- There is a clear demarcation between social classes in India and nowhere is it more evident than in the nutritional landscape. Amway India’s ‘Power of 5’ program, launched in 2018 revealed that in India every second underprivileged child below five years of age could be affected by malnutrition.

Amway launched its globally successful community-based program ‘Power of 5’ as a pilot in India in collaboration with MAMTA Health Institute for Mother and Child. The program was targeted at the mothers and caregivers of children under the age of 5 years and aimed to improve the nutritional knowledge and practices inclusive of complementary feeding, hygiene practices, growth monitoring and dietary diversity through extensive educational interventions.

In its pilot phase, the program was launched in Kirari, an urban slum and resettlement colony of North West Delhi. Over 9700 children were surveyed under the age of five years and come across that most of the children were grappling with huge nutritional gap with 17% children wasted, 31% underweight and 46% stunted. Out of 9700 children, 1700 were wasted and were identified for further monitoring through the entire course of the program. The results at the end of the campaign were startling and at the same time encouraging highlighting that number of children in the Wasted category dropped from 1700 to 328 (79% drop), in the Underweight category dropped from 1236 to 455 (44% drop) and in the Stunted category dropped from 750 to 484 (14% drop).

Anshu Budhraja, CEO, Amway India, said that the malnutrition scenario in our country is in a precarious situation with 31% of the total 150.8 million stunted children in the world and half of all 'wasted' children across the globe.¹. At Amway India, we are committed to use our vast global experience in nutrition and wellness to contribute to the Government of India’s National Nutrition Mission to raise the nutrition levels in the country.

Anshu Budhraja said that our community-based nutritional education intervention to mother also shows that a simple, yet extensive outreach is the way to improve the nutritional status of under-five children. The first-year result of the ‘Power of 5’ campaign is quite promising, and we intend to take this program forward on a much larger scale ultimately making an impact in the lives of as many mothers and children as possible. He added that while continuing to do community work in the identified area of nutrition, we have plans to replicate the same in other states across the country.