Client: U.S. Agency for International Development
Duration: 2019-2025
Region: Sub-Saharan Africa
Country: Zambia
Solutions: Global Health
DAI supports the Government of Zambia in reducing stunting among children under 2 years of age. The first phase of Zambia’s Scaling Up Nutrition program launched in 2011 and covered 14 districts; this phase expanded activities to 30 districts covering 7.1 million people, including 850,000 children under age 2 and their mothers.
Zambia SUN TA layers interventions in nutrition, health, agriculture, access to finance, and water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), building the capacity of Zambian counterparts at all levels to take these interventions forward. The Zambian government is committed to high-impact, nutrition-specific, and nutrition-sensitive interventions. The consortium collaborates with Zambia’s National Food and Nutrition Council (NFNC), ministry representatives, donors, district health workers, and sanitation service providers, among others. DAI’s consortium includes TechnoServe, EXP Zambia, Toilet Yanga, and Viamo.
Stunting is impaired growth and development that children experience as a result of poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation. Affecting 40 percent of Zambian children under age 5, stunting can cause poor cognition and educational performance and other harmful lifelong effects. Zambia SUN TA worked to ensure that more of Zambia’s children grow up healthy, strong, and productive.
Our goal is to contribute to a reduction in stunting, a condition that affects far too many Zambian children—up to 35 percent of children under the age of five—causing lifelong effects such as poor cognition and limited educational performance. To reach this group, we engage thousands of women in maternal and child health education, we work with farmers across 13 districts to help them adopt climate-resilient farming practices to produce diverse, nutritious foods that are crucial to reducing stunting. Through new and rehabilitated boreholes, we deliver clean water to communities, help improve sanitation, and increase access to finance for thousands of rural women.
Since 2019, the project has delivered 1,000 boreholes across 13 districts in Central, Copperbelt, Northern, and Laupula provinces, providing new or improved access to clean and safe drinking water to more than 400,000 people and basic sanitation services to almost 3 million Zambians.
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