WHEELS Global Foundation Receives Grants From RIST Foundation To Impact Lives In Madhya Pradesh

President of WHEELS Global Foundation’s President Ratan Agarwal is pleased to announce ‘WHEELS receiving a major grant of $400,000 from RIST Foundation to address pervasive newborn malnutrition and impact 10m lives in the State of Madhya Pradesh’.

WHEELS Health Council’s Chairman Dr. Raj Shah, MD, along with the partners IIT Bombay’s Health Spoken Tutorials, CSIS, RIST Foundation and State of Madhya Pradesh’ has launched a strategic initiative to address pervasive newborn malnutrition across the entire State of Madhya Pradesh, one of the largest States in India. It is built upon the pioneering work of HST’s lead researcher Dr. Rupal Dalal and groundbreaking mass communication innovation ‘Spoken Tutorial’ by Professor Kannan Moudgalya at IIT Bombay. RIST Foundation is providing the grant to support the first phase deployment in 7 districts, which will eventually impact the entire health infrastructure of MP and >10 million babies and mothers.

What is this Grant About?

It is part of our broad strategic MOU with State of M.P. Health Department signed in June 2022 to collaborate and deploy technology-driven interventions to improve health outcomes.

We are grateful for the great partnership and support from the CSIS team to jointly drive the dialog with M.P. Health leaders (Additional Commissioner and team) and grateful to the RIST Foundation for their large grant to ensure the success of this highly strategic and high-impact initiative, which would open the doors to many other States deploying this proven solution.

Where is the intervention implemented?

Phase 1 covers seven districts of Madhya Pradesh for a duration of 12-18 months and Phase 2 will cover the remaining 46 districts and is expected to start as Phase 1 comes to a close.

Why the initiative?

After very strong results in five rural and tribal districts like Nandurbar (in Maharashtra) where malnutrition rates came down from 67% to low single-digits and weight gain went up as much as five-fold, this initiative would accelerate the intervention at State level. Grant is supporting phase-1 deployment in seven strategically chosen districts to enable capacity building for State (through Training-the-trainer model) to then scale the program to remaining 46 districts, impacting 10m babies and mothers.

The pioneering research by Dr. Rupal Dalal identified the cause of newborn malnutrition as poor breastfeeding techniques that often limit babies to getting only about 28% of the available milk supply from the mother.

This initiative validates WGF’ unique model and ability to bring strategic partners and achieve impact at scale in line with its stated mission of impacting ‘20% of Rurban population in India by 2030’.

How is the intervention planned? 

It is built upon pioneering work of HST’s lead researcher Dr Rupal Dalal and groundbreaking mass communication innovation Spoken Tutorials by Professor Kannan Moudgalya at IIT Bombay. RIST Foundation is providing the grant to support the first phase of seven district deployment, which will eventually impact the entire health infrastructure of M.P. and >10 million babies and mothers.’

The initiative is leveraging an innovative training and communication platform, called Spoken Tutorials, developed at IIT Bombay, to overcome tough scaling challenges of communicating new behaviors and practices across highly distributed, remote, and under-resourced target populations with needed speed and very low cost to match the affordability in the system.

This is a great example of public-private partnership involving several mission-aligned partners, leveraging on-the-ground vast public resources (in this case thousands of PHCs and CHCs, tens of thousands of Asha and Aanganwadi workers), integrated with power of technologies (Spoken Tutorials) and original thinking and research (by Dr. Rupal Dalal) and business creativity (train-the-trainer model) to create necessary long-lasting capacity-building in the public health system to sustain the change and impact.

The teams will be using our Health Spoken Tutorials, created at IIT Bombay in the field. Sharing a short video! Health Spoken Tutorial Promo Video (youtube.com).