Growing up in a suburban area in Cambodia, access to education like understanding child development is still limited. Although the government school that I used to go to has provided education like social study, I wasn’t exposed to a deeper explanation of this kind of topic. As a result, I didn’t have enough education in this area to be able to further share my knowledge or deeply discuss it among others. Despite the inaccessibility, I now received an opportunity to join a project called “Child Development in Cambodia.” It was a chance for me to learn new information that I haven’t studied before about children.
This project aimed to shed impact on children as well as rural Cambodian parents. That being said, our ambition is to share our research about child development with parents to further strengthen their knowledge of how to raise children properly.
Once we stepped into the project, we noticed that the topic itself seemed a little too broad. In this case, we have made a conclusion that each of the team members will be researching independently according to the sub-topics that we were interested in. My teammates have different interests, so they made my job easier to choose my research topic, where it won’t be overlapped. The topic that I chose to research was “Child Nutrition in Cambodia.” Frankly, I have never researched this topic before, so it was pretty new to me. I discovered a lot about nutrition statistics in Cambodia. A bunch of them was prettying astonishing and depressing. Here are some statistics that I have found during the research,
“One in three Cambodian children under 5 years of age are stunted. 32% of children are stunted, 24% are underweight, and 10% are wasted. This is a very high prevalence of malnutrition, and reveals an equity gap in Cambodia with stunting being more common in rural areas (34%) than urban areas (24%) and is less common among the children of more educated mothers.”
These facts demonstrate that we need to fill in the gaps so that we can push the number to its minimum. This is another reason why this project existed.
After the researching process, It all came down to the designing process. During this process, I learned a lot more about the Canva website. It’s a platform where designers can create their own visuals. There were four topics that I have been researching for the past seven weeks. The topics were:
1. General statistic about children nutrition in Cambodia
2. Factors that hinder children from physical growth
3. Common signs of children with malnutrition
4. How to get your children to eat more vegetables
After everything has been laid out and written, my job was to cluster the information (figure above) into a PDF file where people can scroll through it. I have spent almost four weeks designing. It was easy, yet challenging since I need to redesign it over and over according to my facilitator’s comments.
Explore more about Child Nutrition Research (Click here!)
In short, I have gathered so much knowledge from this project. From researching to designing, I have learned so many techniques along the way, especially related to designing graphics. Honestly, this project was the only one that actually required me to work solely. I used to work on a project where we were working toward the same goal, however, this project was a whole new experience for me. Being in this project, I have helped myself understand more about children, and I also have helped a few Cambodian parents to understand some new information about children.