Fostering Ownership and Sustainability of School-Based Nutrition Education Intervention: Challenges and Lesson Learned Through PAR Study in Nepal

Introduction

Schoolchildren spend most of their productive time at school. The health and well-being of schoolchildren must be a fundamental value of society since healthy behaviors developed at early ages persist across their lifespan (Kelder et al., 1994). Fostering healthy nutritional behaviors during early life through the school setting can promote optimal health, growth, and educational development and can contribute to preventing chronic disease in the later stages of life (Cohen et al., 2021; De Bourdeaudhuij et al., 2011; Van Cauwenberghe et al., 2010). Unhealthy behaviors among schoolchildren have underscored the need for participatory action research among the school community in taking a comprehensive approach to getting context-bound solutions to the problem (Upreti et al., 2023).

Schools are perceived as powerful settings that can influence young children’s eating behavior (Centers for Disease Control Prevention (CDC), 2011; Langford et al., 2014) through nutrition education (Contento, 2008, 2011). Schools also provide an optimal supportive setting to promote healthy behaviors leading to healthy lifestyles (Harake et al., 2018; Townsend & Foster, 2011). Moreover, as eating is a socially learned behavior, a school-based nutrition education intervention (SBNEI) can provide an entry point to tap into the power of inter-personal and setting level influences among schoolchildren strengthening healthy nutritional behaviors (Antwi et al., 2020; Dorado et al., 2020; Hawkins et al., 2020; Jung et al., 2019; Upreti et al., 2022; Upreti et al., 2023; Yip et al., 2016). SBNEI is particularly important among students from low-income and ethnic minority communities, as they are at risk for poor health outcomes (Melnick et al., 2022; Seligman et al., 2010). Given the context, this chapter attempts to unpack the range of contextualized participatory approaches that were the hallmarks of the Rupantaran project to foster ownership and sustainability of SBNEI in a public school of Nepal located in Chitwan and to distil lessons learned that may be of use to other future studies and projects with similar aims.