About Us
Nutrition Advocates
We are a team of nutrition academics exploring innovative strategies using ICT to communicate the message of diet-diversity to schools, the community of parents and adults in general. Our aim is to reach out to all the vulnerable populations. Community Nutritionist and Researchers, Aarti Jain and Rima Ved under the guidance of Dr (Mrs.) Ratnaraje Thar, Technical ChiNu at CTARA are striving to reduce the micronutrient dietary gap by promoting diet diversity knowledge and practices; with a view to communicate a behavioral change in the attitudes of the community.
CommunityGIS
CommunityGIS is a Free and Open Source platform for community ownership of data and code for geographic data. Technically communityGIS is a platform for a spatial data infrastructure. This consists of an application (with license GPLv3) frontend as GUI using python Django and Javascripts while the backend is geonode the code is available at github. This platform can be used with modifications for other themes. The preliminary instructions to install and use will be made available soon. This platform of CommunityGIS has been developed by teams from makerghat and CTARA IIT Bombay by Mr Animesh Nautiyal, Ms Himanshi Goyal, Ms Shweta Panwar, Unnati Mishra and team under the guidance of Prof Jitendra Shah, ex-faculty VJTI, now consultant at CTARA IITB.
Overview
We endeavor to focus on innovative strategies for creating awareness using online Nutrition Education Programs (e-NEP) which will promote Nutrition, Health and Hygiene with a focus on the importance of vitamin and mineral rich leafy vegetables from community based nutri-garden/microgreens to overcome the urgent need of micronutrients to combat malnutrition and anaemia among beneficiaries by using a WEBGIS platform.
Beneficiaries
Focus on school children, the community of their parents and adults. This can be extended to Government and Non-Government Agencies involved with the vulnerable groups like as well as pregnant, lactating mothers and anemic adolescents and women of reproductive age.
School children
We aim to create a platform for peer-learning where the school students become the nutri-leaders within their households. As trained Nutri-educators they will ensure and monitor the participation of their classmates. Using this platform, all the school students will be enrolled in an interactive e-Nutrition Education Programs (e-NEP) to improve their own health and nutritional status and bring a change in their household eating behavior.
Nutri Graden(Poshan Vatika)
Nutri-Leaders from the school will be educated in these concepts of nutri-gardening, microgreens cultivation, nutrition, health and hygiene. To put their nutrition in practice, the school will provide a designated area for development of micronutrient rich nutria-garden/microgreens.
Beneficiaries of Government and Non-Government Agencies:
The focus will be on providing adequate e NEP to “Trainers’ such as field health workers, Anganwadi workers Auxiliary nurse midwife who reach out to all vulnerable population within the community. The beneficiaries would include SAM/MAM children, pregnant women, lactating mothers and adolescent girls. With the help of this platform, we aim to train the trainers and directly impact the beneficiaries, who will have direct and quick access to the e- NEP where their queries and feedback. This will enable to the “Trainers” to guide and monitor the health and nutritional status of the beneficiaries.