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School Health and Nutrition (SHN)
Millions of school-age children are affected by serious, yet easily treatable and preventable, illnesses, which inhibit their ability to learn. Save the Children’s School Health and Nutrition (SHN) program is a cost-effective strategy to address a number of the health problems facing school-age children, through health education and health services such as deworming and micronutrient supplementation and healthy environment. Our programs are active in 30 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. These interventions are simple, safe and familiar, and address problems that are widespread and recognized as important within the community, thereby helping children participate in school.
Save the Children works closely with schools and their communities to ensure proper sanitation through building latrines and appropriate hand washing facilities and providing access to safe drinking water. Most importantly, through education, students learn how to adapt their daily habits to improve their health, nutrition, hygiene and prevent HIV and AIDS, gaining these important skills and behaviors for life. Whilst focusing on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) and health education through schools, Save the Children’s SHN programs are nevertheless diverse and adapted to local needs - including for example vision and hearing screening, oral health promotion, malaria prevention and treatment, obesity reduction and violence prevention.
SHN interventions have been shown to improve not only children’s health and nutrition, but also their learning potential and life choices both in the short and long-term. SHN interventions particularly benefit poor and disadvantaged children, who have the most to gain both nutritionally and educationally. Also, by focusing on the special needs for girls – for example through Menstrual Health Management (MHM) – our SHN programs are helping reduce barriers to learning for girls and enhance their overall health.
It is now widely recognized that SHN programs are an important instrument in enabling children to benefit from quality education and reach their educational potential. As such, they are recognized as making a significant contribution towards countries’ efforts to achieve Education for All (EFA) and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Within Save the Children, the SHN programs work closely with the Education Programs to ensure that children in communities served by Save the Children are well educated and healthy. Similarly, School Health and Nutrition Programs are a good continuation of Early Child Development (ECD) programs. Our School Health and Nutrition Programs are recognized as a global model and are in alignment with the UN and World Bank framework for school health and nutrition called FRESH (Focusing Resources on School Health and Nutrition).
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FRESH School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Webinar: Managing Operation and Management- what does it take to reach the SDGs for WASH in schools? March 2019
Introduction to a costing tool to calculate the budget need for schools to provide the basic service level for drinking water, usable sanitation, and handwashing with soap. The tool provides school heads with an easy to manage app, which calculates the an
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FRESH School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Webinar: Holistic school-based food & nutrition education for healthy and sustainable diets- October 2019
What is the role of school-based food and nutrition education (SFNE) in promoting healthy and sustainable diets? What is the current SFNE situation in low and middle-income countries (LMICs)? What is needed to improve SFNE’s impact on children’s diets in
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Save the Children Global Nutrition Factsheet 2019
The global Nutrition factsheet summarizes Save the Children's nutrition approach, advocacy, programming and research work around the world for 2019. It also includes links to recent Save the Children nutrition-related publications School Health & Nutritio
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FRESH School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Webinar: Improving WASH Behaviors among School-age Children Outside of School- November 2019
What tools and methods can be used to engage school-age children in promoting hygiene? What role can children play in promoting hygiene as caregivers for their younger siblings outside school? What are the results of using incentives such as surprise soa
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FRESH School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Webinar: 20 Years of Experience in Integrated School Health and Nutrition Programming- February 2019
What are Save the Children's achievements in its 20 years of experience with school health and nutrition programming? What are the elements of its integrated programming in health and nutrition for school-age children? What are the priorities for Save the
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FRESH School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Webinar: The Blue Schools Kit- August 2019
The Blue Schools Kit: An Approach for Healthy and Environmentally-Friendly Schools How do you transform a school to being healthy and environmentally friendly using low-cost technologies? What activities can inspire students to becoming the next generatio
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Innovation in school-based MHM programming: How do we know what works?
Schools are a popular locus of menstrual health and hygiene (MHH) programming. Although the linkages between addressing MHH in schools and school attendance have been globally emphasised, there is little rigorous evidence. We do know that supporting girls
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Adding a Nutrition Behavior Change Communication Component to an Early Childhood Development Intervention in Malawi
The Nutrition Embedded Evaluation Program Impact Evaluation (NEEP-IE) cluster randomized control trial (CRCT) aimed to assess the effectiveness of implementing an agriculture and nutritional intervention through preschools, known as community-based child
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FRESH School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Webinar: Re-imagining School Health- Maximizing Investment in Human Capital and Rural Economies- April 2019
The past few years have seen a sea change in how the world invests; its young people, well beyond early childhood and all the way into their transition towards adulthood. As the World Bank's Human Capital Index shows, people are an economy's main source
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FRESH School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Webinar: Multilevel Parenting Package for Life Skills Promotion in Challenged and Humanitarian Settings- June 2019
What evidence-based approaches to reduce risky behaviors and promote positive mental health are available in challenged and humanitarian settings? How can caregivers be better parents and strengthen positive age-appropriate family functioning and general
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FRESH School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Webinar: Understanding the Enabling Environment for Teaching and Learning- July 2019
What conditions are required for students and their educators to build their capacity for effective teaching-learning, social interaction, and development? What is the effect of psychosocial stress on educator and student capacities for learning and good
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FRESH School Health and Nutrition (SHN) Webinar: Programming for Children's Social and Emotional Well-being- Lessons from Iraq- September 2019
What is social-emotional learning and how does it happen in schools in Iraq? How do we measure children's social and emotional skills and well-being in emergency and tenuous environments? What tools can we use to evaluate the effect of social-emotional le