Aiming at enhancement of child health, our project focuses the mothers in the area to promote basic knowledge on nutrition, complementary diet meals and home garden. While the target region had been 26 villages last fiscal year, it doubled to 55 villages this year.

The other day our project staff visited one of the newly targeted villages and encountered a noteworthy feature. Obviously the persons to feed children were fathers rather than mothers.

Their village was forced to move to the current place because a dam was built in the old one where they used to live. However, their farming land is still in their previous village. Some residents have to take two hours to get there on foot. In this area, women are deemed to bear farming labor. Furthermore, they do domestic duties at home after coming back home. What do fathers do?

Traditionally, fathers stay at home longer than mothers in this area. Fathers spend their time at home unless they have to do heavy lifting or during busy farming season. Therefore, it is usual in their place that fathers take care of their kids while mothers are working outside the home. Unfair? Could be. But it all depends on how we look at it.

Lately in Japan, fathers who proactively play the role of child-raising, or iku-men, is commonly seen. It might give our project some idea for modifying the approach for involving more fathers in the activities of the project. Considering that we have already observed some fathers participate among mothers in the cooking demonstrations or meetings that FIDR conducts in villages, it would not be too unrealistic.
This kind of opportunity might stimulate them to change their conscious on labor of family.


* supplementary diet meals: softly cooked food in consideration of balanced nutrition for over six months infants along with breast feeding