[Community nutrition strategy project: an innovation in community health]

The strategy of the community nutrition project is based on the utilization of the community development structures to deliver the nutrition services. These structures, represented in Senegal by youth associations, women groups, GIEs and NGOs, are part of the decentralization process, and as such play an important role in health and health development activities in poor urban districts. The Community Nutrition Project (CNP), funded for five years by the World Bank, German Cooperation (KFW), World Food Program (WFP) and the Senegalese government aims to halt further deterioration in the nutrition status of the most vulnerable groups in the poorest urban districts of Senegal. All nutrition services and particularly the IEC services have been entirely contracted out the first year to 76 GIEs involving 323 unemployed persons, operating as micro-enterprises "MIC" and 17 "GIEs" of unemployed physicians, pharmacists, and social workers for a total of 34 persons, organized as "maître d'Oeuvre communautaires "MOC", in charge of the supervision tasks. Each community nutrition center recruits and monitors every six months 460 to 600 beneficiaries composed of women at six months of pregnancy, lactating mother of children under 6 months, and a group of children aged from 6 to 35 months old. An average of 87% of registered children in the nutrition centers are weekly or monthly weighted. Thus the proportion of malnourished children in cohort of children followed from January to July 1996 has decreased from 70% to 25% within six months. The malnutrition rate has been reduced up to 65% after six months.