Strengthening life-saving and preventative nutrition services for vulnerable groups in Dael, Muzaireb and Zaizoun in Dara’a. After 6 years of protracted conflict, critical gaps remain in nutrition services in Southern Syria for pregnant lactating women (PLW) and for children under 5 (CU5). In emergency settings, concerns like household food insecurity, inadequate care, and collapse of health care systems increase the vulnerability of all household members to malnutrition. This program will expand upon the project initiated by SRD between August 1, 2016 and December 1, 2016 as a continuation of the previous HPF funded project. In this phase, community health workers will visit households identified during the previous project (September to December) two times to provide additional preventive and lifesaving nutrition services for pregnant and lactating women and for children under 5. The household visits are intended as behavior change modification activities to improve implementation of IYCFE and breast feeding best practices. SRD will distribute vitamin A to lactating women, micro nutrients tablets to pregnant and lactating women and micro nutrients powder to children 6 months to 5 years. This distribution will provide micro nutrients to cover a 6 months period. SRD will provide a second round of IYCFE training to these households to ensure that proper absorption of materials and to have additional time to assess change in beneficiary behavior and any increase in utilization of breast feeding practices. In this phase, SRD will also target around 1,470 additional households in Dael and Muzaireb to conduct IYCFE and breast feeding and awareness sessions, distribute vitamin A to lactating women, micronutrients tablets to pregnant and lactating women and micronutrients powder to children 6 months to 5 years over a 6 months period. The newly targeted households that were not covered in the previous phase (September to December ) will also receive breastfeeding kits as a way to gain trust and access to beneficiary households and promote effective breastfeeding practices. 
In the first round SRD covered 60% of localities in Muzaireb, all areas of Zaizoun, and 40% of the accessible areas in Dael. In this new phase, SRD will again target these same areas to provide the additional services of micro nutrient distribution and will expand to all the remaining neighborhoods in Dael, Muzaireb, and Zaizoun. They will target households with pregnant/lactating women and children under 5 to provide IYCFE counselling sessions, to distribute breast feeding kits, and to distribute micro nutrients to pregnant lactating women and to children under 5. 

The first phase of the project was funded by the OCHA HPF. This second phase will be also supported by the OHCHA HPF fund. UNICEF will project all the gift in kind micro nutrients for distributions as gift in kind.

SRD is intending this project to all also contribute to the needs articulated in the HRP regarding information management and data collection. Collecting reliable data from inside Southern Syria has been a challenge for the nutrition sector, which also causing difficulties in designing needs based programming and in fully understanding the situation on the ground. The nutrition working group has listed the following in the HRP as a priority for 2017:  Promote nutrition situation analysis using standard response standard tools and screening methodologies on children and women. By utilizing tools to reliably collect and report sex and age disaggregated data and perform rapid assessments and SMART surveys, SRD is falling in line with the HRP priorities for Nutrition. SRD has been in contact with the Nutrition cluster regarding the importance of tools to enhance information collection and sharing. For this reason, SRD is trying to improve data collection by moving away from hand filled documents to electronically collected data on tablets that can be easily uploaded into a program like KOBO.