Maventy tackles individual malnutrition cases and stages of severity by identifying a child’s dietary deficiencies within the larger context of daily nutrition. Malnutrition and undernutrition are, after all, an ongoing result of poor or insufficient meals everyday.

Top nutrition experts from around the globe visit the Anivorano Nord site in Madagascar to conduct dietary research and evaluation of current eating habits of the local population and the nutritional value of the locally available foods. Based on the ongoing research, nutritionists compile sensible and nutritionally rich meal plans for each stage of a child’s development and consumption/digestion ability. Some of the most nutritious food in the northern region of Madagascar, though least incorporated into families’ diets, are avocados, peanuts and peanut butter, fish, and seafood.

These nutrition plans are crucial to the rehabilitation of various stages of malnutrition because the suggested foods are locally available and affordable, ultimately allowing the child’s parents to implement more nutrition into his or her diet in a feasible way with longevity. On-site medical volunteers work together with the nutritionists and clinic doctors to effectively communicate the nutritionally diverse foods on the meal plans to families in order to restructure the way they feed their children, and ultimately strengthen their youth’s growth. On the other hand, they instruct parents what foods are commonly fed to children that don’t offer substantial nutrition, like rice water.

From the first clinic visit, the combination of nutritional assessment and nutritional education for the parents streamlines the rehabilitation and rejuvenation of the malnourished child. Upon the child’s next visit, his or her physical growth and progress is cross-referenced with a new round of nutritional assessment to determine what kind of foods will help boost his health further and allow him or her to grow at a healthy weight and size range.

Although Maventy’s primary focus is diagnosing and treating malnutrition in children first-hand, we also strive to renew and strengthen the medical clinics, facilities, and supplies – which the children and families of Madagascar count on for their medical car entirely. Maventy partners with the Ministry of Health to run the program from local clinics and buildings, housing volunteers, doctors, and area-specific experts during their on-site stays with the program. In turn, Maventy provides the medical facilities with more effective and efficient tools, such as scales, measuring equipment, and stethoscopes, as well replacing old, outdated or broken supplies. This ensures that the quality of medical care provided to the people of Anivorano is consistently improving and exponentially increasing the impact and accuracy of each person’s medical visits and treatments.

Much like Maventy replenishes and reworks the infrastructure of the diets of malnourished children and their families, it more literally rebuilds and rejuvenates the physical infrastructure of the medical facilities in Madagascar. Partnering with the Ministry of Health allows Maventy the freedom to operate and organize its medical staff and volunteers within the existing Madagascar clinics and structures. Maventy’s volunteers aim to improve the lives of their patients in many ways, one of which is rebuilding and strengthening the physical space of the clinic sites. Maventy volunteers help renovate the structures by painting, cleaning, installing light fixtures and mosquito nets, and building new furniture, chairs, and exam tables.

The precision and quality of Maventy’s malnutrition program is grounded largely in its innovative technology and database integration, which allows key tracking of multiple patients as well as immediate diagnosis of the patient’s severity of malnutrition in real time. Maventy developed and implemented an online child malnutrition database, which records each visit of every unique patient. Because the database is stored online, it is accessible from any internet-connected site in the world. Thus, the absence of an abundantly hi-tech medical office is assuaged with the brutally efficient and informative child malnutrition database, which stores, stores, and recalls daily patient visits, as well as determines the state of malnutrition from the entry of a child’s measurements.

Furthermore, this technology and data-capturing capability extends beyond the limits of internet accessibility, which can scarce in places where patients need medical care the most – such as some villages in Madagascar. Our expert IT volunteers developed a mobile Android application which operates offline on any Android-compatible smartphone. This allows a volunteer in the field to venture out into one of many villages which are too far from the central clinic site for the patients to visit, and measure and record patients’ data on the spot in the remote village. The application houses the patient data in the same format as the central child malnutrition database until the volunteer can connect to the internet again and upload the data to the main portal.

With these basic yet powerful technological staples, Maventy digitalizes dietary analysis and, furthermore, expands it to rural and remote areas with the emphasis of mobility, interactivity, and user efficiency.

In order to reach and treat the most patients possible, Maventy puts a great deal of focus on transportation, the best methods of obtaining it for patients and program staff, as well as the most monetarily feasible and sustainable way of maintaining it. Hospitals across Madagascar operate outdated, slow, and largely unsafe ambulances for lack of a better alternative. Unless in the case of an emergency, Maventy transports patients and its staff in the program’s SUV. A large vehicle to transport patients and staff is crucial in allowing the medical volunteers to travel and reach people in distant villages (which are frequently spaced out amongst poor road conditions) to receive medical attention.

We are ultimately striving to build resources toward a functional, efficient, and dependable ambulance, which will increase community medical outreach dramatically by allowing the doctors and medical volunteers to go beyond the metropolitan center and reach people in more remote area. To find out more about how to help us reach our transportation goals, please visit us on the “Contribute” page, and find out exactly how much your donation will impact this cause.

In 2012 MHI has introduced its first mobile application for child malnutrition.

Volunteers can evaluate children in remote villages, while getting offline instant point for data entry and ability to upload the data to the main database whenever the connection to the internet becomes available.

This tool has further simplified data entry and made our point of care evaluations electronic.

Any person entering simple data can receive immediate and accurate results of the child including z-scores.

About Maventy

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