Beginning in September 2017, SPRING supported a national technical working group to ensure that new evidence-based recommendations—particularly for prevention and treatment of anemia and parasitic infections—were incorporated into the national antenatal care (ANC) clinical protocol.
Malnutrition among adolescents can adversely affect health and productivity in adult life; among school-going children, micronutrient deficiencies such as iron-deficiency anemia can reduce overall learning ability and concentration.
On June 22, 2018, the USAID-funded SPRING project in the Kyrgyz Republic hosted an event in Bishkek to share important lessons and accomplishments of the project from 2014 to 2018.
The SPRING project, funded by USAID, launched activities in Uganda in April 2012, to work toward reductions in stunting and maternal and child anemia and proportion of children and adults with severe acute malnutrition.
SPRING’s major accomplishments in Uganda fall into five categories:
The CORE Group’s annual Global Health Practitioner Conference was held June 4th – 7th, 2018 in Bethesda, Maryland. This year, the conference was centered on the theme “Community Health Action for the Humanitarian-Development Nexus.” Three SPRING staff members attended the conference, with two of them delivering presentations on SPRING’s work and lessons learned.
Since 2015, SPRING supported the Ministry of Health and Sanitation (MoHS) in Sierra Leone to build a multi-sectoral coordination platform to address anemia. Efforts began with a Landscape Analysis of Anemia and Anemia-related Programming, revealing that although anemia is a severe public health problem, iron deficiency, typically a main contributor, is surprisingly low.
The SPRING project began work in Ghana in 2014 in response to a request from USAID/Ghana for support to reduce stunting in the Feed the Future zone of influence in the Northern and Upper East Regions of the country.