Summary

Child In Need Institute (CINI) provides and facilitates nutrition, health, education and protection services to poor and marginalized children and women in villages and slum areas in West Bengal, Chattisgarh, and Jharkhand states of India.

Key program components

Children receive age appropriate immunizations and their parents are taught measures to prevent transmission of infections and take advantage of low-cost nutritious diets and positive health seeking behaviours. The family is visited at home by CINI trained health workers and their progress is monitored on parent retained health cards.

Families are encouraged to drink safe water, use sanitary toilets and sleep in insecticide treated mosquito nets to prevent malaria and dengue. As a part of their pregnant women care program, CINI staff teach mothers to eat well in order to deliver babies with birth weight above 2.5 kgs. After delivery, exclusive breastfeeding is promoted to ensure that the child is supplied with antibodies to prevent childhood ailments. Low-cost and easily available, the consumption of locally raised foods are encouraged. The importance of frequent feeding and improving quality of foods is emphasized.

In addition to its emergency ward and nutrition clinic, CINI operates a series of drop-in clinics at its headquarters south east of Kolkata. Pregnant women and women with children up to the age of five can come and consult doctors and health workers about pre-natal care, breast feeding, nutrition, vaccination and childhood illnesses.

CINI works with about two million people directly and impacts a total of over five million lives with their numerous programs. CINI uses online donation mechanisms where individual donors can sponsor pregnancy care, delivery, and postnatal care of mothers and children and even go on to support the child for up to fourteen years.

Its funding breakdown is as follows: d

• Donations from the community it serves (10%),

• Donations from the state and central government of India against grants for projects (15%),

• Their own fund raising efforts in India and internationally (10%)

• Donations from national and international donors (65%).

CINI received the National award for Child Welfare twice, the latest in 2004.