Children's Nutrition Improvement And Rural Basic Education Development

With the development of China’s reform after1978, China had been achieved many great development in urban areas. In rural China, however, dual economy condition does not promote the same great development, but created a big gap, especially in rural education. In regards to childhood development, anemia leads to learning problems associated with poor school attendance, bad behavior and overall poor educational performance, which, from the long run, not only reduce the human capital accumulation and handicapped the transformation of their industry development, but also increase the poverty and break the continuous sustainable development for developing countries, china is not expected. The overall goal of this paper is to test whether nutritional knowledge training intervention and multi-vitamin pills (iron-fortified) can lower the anemia rate of school-aged children in rural China. To meet this goal, we report on the result of a randomized control trails (RCTs) involving over4158fourth grade students, mostly aged9to12, from66randomly selected elementary schools in9poorest counties of Shaanxi province. The intervention was designed to improve the hemoglobin level of young children by nutritional knowledge training to parents and multi-vitamin pills to children each day. We found that more than21.5%students had hemoglobin levels below120g/l. And because of the crowding out effect of nutritious breakfast program in sample schools, we found that the first intervention of multi-vitamin pills to children every day can greatly lower the anemia rate, which is to rise the hemoglobin level about2g/L, but the information trainings with parents in two semesters cannot reduce the anemia rate significantly, but with different appearances to different groups, which divided by their gender and weather they are boarding at school. We found that the information to the parents can increase the hemoglobin levels about2.1g/l, but the training had no influence on the boarding students. To the girls, the training does not have any significant impact on their academics performance, but to the Boys the impact was obvious. We also found that the training have obvious impact on students who take two meals per day on usual, but no significant impact on students with three meals per day as usual, which also demonstrate our explanation of the crowding out effect. So, these results should encouraged China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) issued a set of comprehensive policies to young children’s health program, and provide better nutritious foods and relevant knowledge training to parents.