been a focus of Alive & Trive. Breast- feeding is natural, Menon said, but exclu- sive breastfeeding for a full six months is often challenging for women.
“Maybe they’re not getting enough help with breastfeeding when they have problems. Or maybe other people in the house decide the child can have some- thing other than breast milk because the dad brings home, say, a tin of formula milk,” she said.
So Alive & Trive doesn’t just target mothers—it also uses mass media to reach fathers and engages with older women who may play a part in child rearing. And it makes use of advocacy and engagement with policymakers to support the efforts of governments and other partners to improve child feeding in the three coun- tries. Part of the goal of the program is to learn what works. “Our team is bringing innovation and rigor to the evaluation of these interventions,” said Menon.
© 2012 V. Aggarwal/IFPRI
of international food policy. She was a self-described “foodie” who imagined someday running a restaurant or hotel.
Tis was the future she was pursuing when she took up the study of nutrition at the University of Madras. But as she worked with women and young children in the field as part of her master’s degree program at the University of Delhi, Menon was struck by the importance of engaging communities with nutri- tion first-hand. She was hooked. “I just started to feel like the community side of it was much more exciting and much more relevant,” Menon said. “Tat’s where I wanted to go.”
Two decades later, after earning a doctorate at Cornell University and working to im- prove nutrition programs in Haiti and else- where, Menon is helping draw attention
to the severity of India’s nutrition problem. A 2009 New York Times article quoted her on the challenges facing India’s efforts to improve infant undernutrition, and in 2010 she wrote a Foreign Policy op-ed calling for smarter nutrition interventions by India’s national and local governments.
As part of both POSHAN and Alive & Trive, Menon and her staff collect volu- minous amounts of data about the lives of women and children, and the systems surrounding them, through surveys and anthropological research. Tey then use that information to tell policymakers and program implementers how they can support women’s adoption of nutrition- promoting recommendations.
One example is the effort to persuade women to exclusively breastfeed for the first six months of a baby’s life, which has
POSHAN aims to address a critical gap in India: less than 55 percent of moth- ers and children receive essential health and nutrition interventions. Tis gap occurs in part because it can be difficult to scale up the delivery of high-quality health and nutrition services. In addition, policymakers lack consensus on how to address undernutrition and so adopt inef- fective policy solutions.
Menon and her colleagues are starting their research by gathering evidence on health and nutrition programs in India, focusing on three or four states. Next they will turn to finding the most effective ways of communicating with program implementers and policymakers.
“We are trying to understand what the evidence base looks like,” Menon said, “but also what people are looking for when they’re making those decisions, what’s really going to work to enable the system to deliver that behavior.”
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