E-poster prepared for Knowledge Fair side event at 2020 Conference on "Leveraging agriculture for improving nutrition and health," Feb 10-12, 2011, New Delhi, India Credit: Rekha Shori

1. Advocacy of malnutrition as a developmental problem associated with social disparity
and must be addressed beyond health sector. Improving people’s nutrition is a country
investment. Critical mass led by prime-movers resulted in the adoption of nutrition
explicitly included in the 5-y national development plan. Inadequate inter- & intra-sectoral
coordination was the major hurdle in the early implementation, due to rigidity in the
government infrastructure and resource allocation for implementing integrated program.
Integrating nutrition into broader national social and health development, spearheaded by
the Poverty Alleviation Plan (1982-1986) facilitated the scale-up of nutrition program.
Organizational reform allowed for harmonization and complementarity of the top-down
macro policy and micro level bottom-up planning.
Village health volunteers were trained and
became key community mobilizers. For nutrition,
volunteers were responsible for carrying out
growth monitoring and promotion, using simple
and appropriate technology. Marked improvement
in child undernutrition was observable within
about 5 years of this national effort. Nutrition
component was then integrated into the basic
minimum needs approach in the broadened
development framework of ‘quality of life’.
Sustainability of nutrition improvement can be
appreciated and withstand the impact of recent
Asian economic crisis.
Scaling-up integrated community based nutrition program in
Thailand