The Sumba Foundation has developed a teaching program that focuses on nutrition and hygiene education for students.
Our nutrition and hygiene course is taught to children in primary grades 4 and 5. We start at this grade, rather than earlier because the younger children typically cannot speak the national language of Bahasa Indonesia and spend their first three years in school learning it.
Our eight-point course is directly related to the School Lunch Program, so the students participating can see firsthand what a nutritious meal looks like. The children learn general health information, healthy foods and diets, general body hygiene (theory and practice), illness, diarrhea, malaria, infections, dental hygiene, and trash/waste disposal.
Our nutrition and hygiene course is supplemental to the core curriculum that schools must follow as a national standard. It’s taught in 16 of the 22 primary schools we support.
