NBB’s Holistic Approach

Navajeevan firmly believes that the biological family is the best place for child’s overall development.

Navajeevan’s first priority is to strengthen communities to help families to retain and care for their children. It’s vital to empower the leaders of the target communities and strengthen their families, equipping them with information on various legislation, case laws, govt schemes/programmes, etc and enable them to organize, demand and access their rights and entitlements, with special focus on child/women rights. Also Navajeevan attempts to equip communities with self-help skills and enhance access to education.

All these children not in the direct residential care of Navajeevan, have to be followed up, so that they are not forced into child labour, child marriage, or fallen victims to domestic violence and other forms of abuse, or to trafficking for domestic child labour, industrial/agricultural labour, or child sex work, etc. This intervention is even more important during and post COVID scenarios, as the families may tend to fall into these traps due to the loss of livelihoods, increased financial constraints and  acute poverty.

Here are some examples of ways in which Navajeevan is working to strengthen communities

• Access to affordable education either in state institutions or in Don Bosco schools, colleges and technical training centres, all of which require sponsorship to access to solar electricity as adequate power supply is non-existent in a great part of India.
• Evening tuition including in literacy for adults and day care services for children and adults

(30-40%of adults are illiterate in India and over 50% of children are illiterate, some of the lowest levels of

attainment in the developing world )

• Nurturing of women’s self-help groups including skills training for women
• Navajeevan also intends to develop the culture of low cost nutrition & kitchen gardens, growing organic vegetables especially the leafy greens, along with the medicinal plants for common ailments. This is especially true for the children of the migrants’ and the internally displaced Yenadi families who attend Navajeevan’s day bridge schools.
• Navajeevan also plan to focus to spread the culture of planting saplings and nurturing trees, along with the plastic free environment in its operational areas.

This is needed as a big problem in the state of Andhra Pradesh is the widespread malnutrition/anaemia status among children, including the Navajeevan’s home district of Krishna. Navajeevan focuses on this issue through its community outreach projects, identifying those children suffering from severe anaemic conditions through oedema test, verbal screening and HB test  In the local district of Krishna, almost one-third (31%) of children under age five years are stunted or too short for their age, which indicates that they have been undernourished for some time. Poor nutrition increases the body’s vulnerability to infections, as well as the incidence, severity and length of infections such as TB.  Malnourished children may never attain their full potential height or cognitive potential (https://www.who.int/nutgrowthdb/2018-jme-brochure.pdf).