weighing children to save their lives....

If you are a mom or dad (or if you remember going to the doctor when you were a toddler!) you know that a routine part of a doctor's visit for a child is for him to be weighted and for his size to be charted. Weighing a child is a way of monitoring her growth, and discovering whether or not she's healthy.

Here in Rwanda (Kibogora), as recently as five years ago, children were generally not weighed. This was not because of ignorance but because of poverty. There were scales at the health centers in scattered villages, but the concept of a "regular check-up" for a child is laughable in a community where the average person makes $2 a day. In the meantime, children would die of malnutrition (and other illnesses made worse by malnutrition).

This changed about four years ago, when WR's child survival program instituted community growth monitoring, a monthly program to weigh children at neighbors' homes, right in the villages, in order to prevent malnutrition and monitor low-weight children before they became severely (and life-threatening-ly) ill. The scales are the kind you can hang from a tree or a beam in the roof....here's a photo from the Mbande Clinic:



Malnutrition rates in Kibogora were reduced since instituting growth monitoring and introducing malnutrition programs in local homes. Awesome!