The Positive Deviance!

In 1990, about 65% of Vietnamese children were suffering from malnutrition.

The Government of Vietnam invited Jerry Sternin to solve this problem.

Jerry Sternin was a member of the US NGO ‘Save the Children’.

This was a tough assignment for Jerry Sternin because he was given six months by the Vietnamese Government to solve this issue.

So what was the root cause of malnutrition?

The intelligent data shows that malnutrition is the outcome of:

• poverty
• lack of proper sanitation
• water scarcity

The typical solution to eradicate malnutrition is to first solve the above problems.

But Sternin knew that he cannot solve all those issues in six months.

The budget was also limited.

So he created his own strategy.

He met with the group of local mothers and divided them into teams.

He gave them the task of weighing and measuring every child in their village.

When the results were out he asked a simple question to the woman scanning the data.

“Did you find any very, very poor kids who are bigger and healthier than the typical child?”

The woman replied with a YES.

He asked her another question.

“You mean it is possible today in this village for a very poor family to have a well-nourished child?”

The woman again replied with a YES.

The next step of Sterning was to study what the smart mothers were doing to keep their children healthy.

He measured the quantity of food that these smart mothers were feeding to their children.

The quantity of food eaten by well-nourished children and malnourished children were almost the same.

But the smart mothers were feeding their children four small meals per day.

And the unhealthy and malnourished children were eating two large meals in a day.

The unhealthy kids could not digest the large meals because of their malnourished stomachs.

Then he found that these smart mothers were hand feeding their children.

The hand feeding encouraged the children to eat their meals even if they were sick.

Then he investigated whether the healthier children were having any special foods.

He was right.

The smart mothers picked shrimps and crabs from the rice paddies and were mixing them with their kid’s rice.

They were also mixing sweet potatoes-green, which looked down as a low-class food.

The shrimps, crabs, sweet potatoes-green, were the superfoods.

Jerry Sternin had found a solution to solve the malnutrition problem.

Now the bigger challenge ahead of him was to put this solution in place.

He could have distributed pamphlets or made an announcement.

But he knew that no one will follow his instructions.

And even if they start following, they would drop it after some time.

So Sternin came up with another strategy.

Again with the help of local mothers, he formed cooking classes in the villages.

In the cooking classes, the mothers learned how to cook tasty and healthy meals using superfoods.

They learned about the importance of hand feeding the children.

They learned about the advantage of four small meals over two large meals.

Within six months of Sternin’s visit, 65% of the Vietnamese kids were better nourished.

After a few years, researchers from Emory University traveled to Vietnam to do a survey.

They recorded that even the Vietnamese children born after Sternin visit were healthier.

This proves that Sternin was successful in fixing the issue of malnutrition.

What would have happened if Sternin had followed the traditional approach?

What have happened if he wanted to first fix the issue of sanitation, poverty, and water scarcity?