Project Update: Tackling Malnutrition and Health in Mugu, Nepal. A Three Year UK Aid Direct Funded Charity Project

This project aims to fight malnutrition in Mugu – an extremely remote, rural and hard to reach area of Nepal. It will do this through increasing skills training opportunities, increasing awareness of nutrition and increasing pressure on local government and opinion leaders to invest both emotionally and financially in this preventable issue. This project has been funded with UK aid and charity donations from the British people.

PHASE have been working in Mugu district since March 2016. The area is one of PHASE’s showcase projects, already demonstrating significant impact in a high need, inaccessible area. Mugu has an extremely high number of children under 5 years old with global acute malnutrition. This project will sustainably address the immediate and underlying causes of malnutrition among 1,600 ‘left behind’ children. It will be the vital nutrition aspect of an integrated Health and Nutrition project.

The measurable and specific change will be 800 poor and vulnerable families (including young children) having better access to safe and nutritious food all year round which will reduce stunting and wasting in children under 5 and address the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and older persons. This will be achieved by both improving the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women and family farmers, through productive resources and inputs, knowledge and markets and improving resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather and other disasters.

Having seen a similar project in Wai work successfully, we are confident that this much needed project will help to improve the lives of people living in Mugu and will contribute towards a healthier, more aware population. Ultimately though we know that this project will save lives. Nobody should suffer from malnutrition in a world where we have so much resource and knowledge. Together with UK Aid, and the British people, we can, and will, make a difference in Nepal.