Encouraging results from Nestle Vietnam school nutrition pilot programme

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That was mainly because the kids themselves and relevant people lack the necessary knowledge about proper nutrition and physical practicing.

This was why in 2012 global nutrition group Nestle launched the programme ‘Nestle Healthy Kids’ in Vietnam in cooperation with Vietnam’s National Institute of Nutrition, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education and Training.

The programme took place at 13 primary schools in four provinces and municipalities including Bac Ninh, Hai Duong, Ninh Binh and Can Tho.

The initiative core target is to better awareness about nutrition for students, helping their parents and teachers realise the importance of nutrition to children health, from there applying into daily activities.

The programme results proved encouraging after one year pilot implementation.

Accordingly, the programme website had attracted 7,000-13,000 clicks per month; over 10,000 students from 13 schools in stakeholder provinces were trained in nutrition and from 62-85 per cent of them scored good marks at the final tests on nutrition knowledge.

According to the rectors at stakeholder schools joining the programme, Nestle Healthy Kids was a useful and practical programme helping the teachers more easily in transferring knowledge about nutrition to students; it had effectively supported other lessons on natural and social issues in the curricular and students’ general knowledge about nutrition was improved markedly.

“Increasing knowledge about food and nutrition for students is one of important solutions in the national nutrition strategy from 2011-2020 with vision towards 2030 in order to improve physical and mental capacity for Vietnamese people. We hope the students would play an active part in delivering suitable messages about proper nutrition to the wider community in an effective manner,” said deputy head of the National Institute of Nutrition Le Bach Mai.

Nestle is a world leader in food and beverage with a global production and business network. Nestle is managing a pipeline of around 500 factories in 86 countries, employing over 280,000  staff and marketing 8,500 brands with 30,000 products.

Nestle Healthy Kids Vietnam is part of global Nestle Healthy Kids programme. Debuted in 2009, the programme has now benefitted about six million children in more than 60 countries.