Public Health Nutrition Volunteer in Philippines

The Public Health Nutrition Program in the Philippines aims to rectify and improve the malnourished condition of infants, especially those born in low-income communities. This project is more on the lines of public awareness and includes a feeding program for malnourished children.

It’s goal is to educate the parents, being the primary caretakers, on the value and importance of proper nutrition, and how it affects overall health. The project may take you out of your comfort zone as it will require you to visit the public market and cook Filipino dishes you are unfamiliar with.

Under this project, VolSol volunteers have to organise seminars and workshops for the local and the rural communities and enlighten them about the benefits of a balanced diet and maintaining nutritional plans. Through these information-rich workshops, volunteers have to convince the parents to create a food habit that is rich in vital nutrients and nourishing for the kids. These learnings have to be imparted keeping in view that the locals do not compromise on their personal savings. The goals of the project are two-fold.

The first is to provide a stable supplementary feeding program for malnourished infants for pre-school children aged 3 to 6 years old, and school age sponsored children.

The second is to disseminate information to parents about the importance of healthy nutrition through a series of workshops and seminars.

Through this process, parents get to witness the improvement that good nutrition has on the health of their children whilst at the same time learning how to best utilize their available resources to provide a stable diet regardless of their personal income.

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Volunteer Roles & Responsibilities

Volunteers will be supervised by the local coordinator and work alongside one or two other nutrition volunteers.Depending on the site to which the volunteer is assigned to, he/she may work either in the morning or afternoon but always only half a day from Monday to Friday except during holidays for at least 4 hours daily.

The volunteer is responsible for providing meals to the children on a daily basis. He/she will plan the menu taking into consideration the nutritional deficiencies that need to be addressed. He/she will purchase local ingredients available at the market to supplement the nutritional needs of the children. He/she will monitor the kids’ progress by measuring their height and weight to calculate the BMI.

In addition, the volunteer must teach the kids proper hand-washing and brushing teeth after meals at the beginning of the project and continue to practise this the whole time. It is the aim to instil good practices in these children.

With regards to planning menus, volunteers must take into consideration the locally available resources the kids normally eat. Primarily the reason is that the kids would only eat food they are used to eating. Secondly, parents are more likely not able to afford vegetables and other food items not normally available locally. The project aims to educate the parents in such a way that they can replicate at home what the volunteers are making in the project.

Every two weeks there is a nutrition lecture for the parents of the children enrolled in the program. We always encourage volunteers to start with basic hygiene and nutrition. Not all parents have a good grasp of the English language so it is imperative that lectures are easy to understand and filled with illustrations. During lectures/workshops a local coordinator will be there to assist and translate.

Below is a list of tasks to be done by volunteers under this project;

• Preparing supplementary feeding

• Recording and analyzing the status (height and weight) of children on the project

• Enlighten the people in the community about the benefits of a balanced diet and maintaining nutritional plans

• Organise seminars and workshops for the local and the rural communities

• Convince the parents to create a food habit that is rich in vital nutrients and nourishing for the kids

Requirements & eligibility

Volunteers must be 18 years or older at the time of joining the project and must be flexible and open-minded towards working in a new and challenging environment The project is suitable for students of Health Sciences, Nutrition, Dietetics, Public health or qualified nutritionist and dietitian. Anyone with a keen interest in the broader field of community health can also join the program.