positive action

摘要

In the early 1990s, Jerry Sternin of Save the Children was faced with what seemed an impossible task - to improve infant nutrition problems in Vietnam with no money, limited time and in a potentially hostile environment. He used an approach based on the work of Dr Marion Zeitlin, a leading nutritionist, in the 1980s. She had discovered that in most communities, even very deprived ones, there were some families that fed their children better than others, within the same constrained resources. It involved identifying 'positive deviants' (PDs), in this case, people whose children were well nourished, but who had access to exactly the same resources as everyone else. Jerry, along with wife Monique, knew that there were women in each village who were paid to weigh the children and report back to the reolevant authorities. They trained these women to plt the weights of children on a scattergram which identified that there were a small number of well-nourished children. Then the women were trained to ask those families with the well-nourished children questions about what they were fed, how they were fed and any other relevant practices such as hygiene.