PALO, Leyte - Region 8 representives from the Department of Health (DOH), Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), and the National Nutrition Council attended Orientation and planning workshop on the implementation of the Philippine Multi-sectoral Nutrition Project (PMNP).

As a follow up activity, the same representatives meet to finalize the Regional Organizational Structure and Workplan. Both are crucial in the implementation of the project.

The Philippines Multisectoral Nutrition Project (PMNP) is a World Bank grant of about US$178.1 million loan or closely PHP 10 billion to support Philippines’ efforts to combat malnutrition.

The PMNP will support the delivery of nutrition and health care services at the primary care and community levels to help reduce stunting. Stunting is characterized by prolonged nutritional deficiency among infants and young children. It will be implemented in 235 municipalities known to have high incidence of poverty and malnutrition.

In region it will be implemented in four provinces namely Leyte, Samar, Northern Samar, and Eastern Samar. There are 22 municipalities included in Leyte, 21 in Samar, 14 in Northern Samar and 13 in Eastern Samar. Eastern Visayas has the most number of LGUs to be covered with 70 municipalities. 

The above project will deliver a package of nutrition-specific and nutrition-sensitive interventions across the various local government (LGU) platforms together with a social behavior change and communications interventions. Households with pregnant women and children under two years will benefit from high-impact nutrition interventions including infant and young feeding, regular growth monitoring, multiple micronutrient supplements for children 6–23 months, iron-folic acid supplementation for pregnant women, vitamin A supplementation for children, dietary supplementation for nutritionally-at-risk pregnant women, and treatment of moderate and severe acute malnutrition (World Bank, 2022).

The project will also support behavioral change campaigns for targeted households and communities to adopt behaviors crucial to improving nutrition outcomes for women and children, including hand washing with soap at critical times; improved sanitation and access to safe drinking water; early child-care and development; nutrition-focused child-care development activities; and promoting access to Pantawid Pamilya or 4Ps, one of the country’s social protection programs, the World Bank continued.

The project will be anchored in the Department of Health’s Universal Health Coverage initiative. Moreover, the project will provide performance-based grants to local government units, linked to delivery of pre-defined nutrition, maternal and child services, and improvements in local level planning and budgeting for nutrition projects to encourage implementation of these nutrition interventions through the country’s primary health care system.

The project is spearheaded by the DOH and Department of DSWD with technical support from the National Nutrition Council (NNC), Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) and various development partners.

During the region’s follow up meeting, the team finalizes its work and financial plan incorporating the three major components including social and behavioral change communication (SBCC) activities.

It was also reported by the DSWD Field Office 8 that their Kalahi staff already conducted orientation and letter of intent (LOI) from 40 LGUs has already been finalized and collected. The LOI will signify the LGUs’ intent to participate in the project and its willingness to share project counterparts and equity. The counterparts may be in the form of cash or in kind.

NNC8 Dr. Catalino P. Dotollo, Jr. advised the team to make project nomeclature clear. The project is dubbed Philippine Multi-sectoral Nutrition Project (PMNP) and not KALAHI- CIDSS. The component under DSWD will be pattern after the success of KALAHI-CIDSS. #RNPC-CPD

The project is aimed at scaling up critical nutrition specific and nutrition sensitive interventions in the end goal to end hunger, poverty and reducing if not eliminating all forms of malnutrition. Subsequently, all of these will redound to improved maternal and child morbidity ans mortality. #RNPC-CPD