How does social media technology (SMT) help to organize children nutrition program

– A case from ChinaYixin DAI

School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University

Overview

• Background

• Research Question

• A case of SMT influence over children

nutrition program

• Conclusions and Discussion

Background of the Research

• Nutrition improvement still exists as one of the most severe situation to Chinese children, especially in rural areas despite the quick economic development pace

• Multiple government sectors got involved in this issue, yet, there are still difficulties for government sectors to solve this issue

19781981

19841987

19901993

19961999

20022005

20082011

0

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

60000

GDP（ Billion Yuan）

GDP per Capita (Yuan)

Year Source: Chinese Bureau of Statistics

Nutrition Situation for Chinese Children

• According to “Chinese school-age children Nutrition and Health Survey” report in 2006, overall nutrition situation of Chinese children have been greatly improved.

• Yet,

• For children in rural areas in low income families, nutrition situation is still greatly need to be improved– The overall rate of malnutrition was 9.2% in 2006. The rate was

especially high in rural areas with low income family. Boy rate over took 20% in these areas (CDC, 2006).

– Related to this, the anemia rate raised up along with the decrease of family annual income. In five annual income groups, anemia rate is significantly higher with family income lower than 5000 per year (CDC, 2006).

– lower nutritional status (particularly height-for-age) was found to affect school performance adversely (Jamison, 1986)

Under Nutrition comparison between rural areas and rural areas with low income

Rate of low weight Rate of delayed growth

All rural areas

General rural areas

Poor rural areas

All rural areas

General rural areas

Poor rural areas

1998 9.8 7.0 14.5 27.9 23.4 36.4

2000 10.3 7.4 15.8 25.3 19.1 36.9

2005 6.1 4.4 9.4 16.3 13.9 20.9

2008 5.1 3.9 7.3 13.7 10.9 18.9

2009 4.6 3.8 6.1 12.6 9.4 18.3

2010 4.3 2.3 8.0 12.1 7.5 20.3

Source: Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) , 2012

Therefore, School age children nutrition situation, esp. for those in rural areas with low family income needs more attentions

Programs aiming at improve children nutrition situation in China

• Efforts have been made to help children in low income families in two ways:

• Programs are either education oriented– Compulsory Education Law (1986) and series of governmental projects

(1997, 2001): tuition exemption, subsidy to boarders. – Hope Project and educational grants policy (1989, 2003, 3004, 2008):

Educational grants for low-income students for 2 yuan/day.

• Or Nutrition oriented without special focus on school age children– MDG Achievement Fund in China (2013)– Ministry of Agriculture and FAO: “Chinese woman and youth nutrition and

food safety program” （ 2010-2012） .– HEALTH: “Children nutrition improvement project in Chinese poor area”.

10 million for a 3-year program in 6 elementary schools to improve nutrition of the kids and their families through providing 10 month nutrition bags

• Puzzles: how do we who needs what kind of help?

• Puzzles in Children Nutrition Improvement– Uneven distribution of

charity and donations– Not enough supervision and

not enough transparency– Hard to modify

• Features of Social Media Technology （ SMT）– Quick information exchange– Easy to involve– Interactive– Wide spread– Individualized– Flexible– Transparent

SMT have been adopted in dealing with public affairs all over the world Searching for lost children: China Charity in nature disaster: Hurricane

Sandy Flu prediction using SMT ……

Research Question

• What is the concurrent governance structure for Children nutrition program in China? What are advantages and disadvantages of the structure?

• How could social media technology (SMT) help to change the nutrition program governance structure in China? What advantages this might bring to these programs?

Case 1: Government-led Nutrition Meal Project

Subsidy Standards:

• 5 yuan per student per day

• Nutrition snacks or nutrition

meals (milk and bread)

• Started in 2008, “1 yuan for a nutrition meal” charity project raised up by China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation

• Government actions followed: central government and local government spend 10 billion yuan in 2010 to ensure majority of the students in poor counties in mid and west rural area with nutrition snacks

• Program covered 12.25 million students 816 yuan per student

Typical Governance Structure for Children Nutrition Program

• International organization: International fund, international training, inter-organizational dialogue, collaboration

• Central Government: program initiation and resource allocation

• Local government : implementation in terms of local resource allocation with priority over local interests

• Local organizations and local community: implementation in terms of training organization , special experts in agriculture, education, etc.

Governance Structure for A Typical Nutrition Program

Central Government

City Government

Community/School

Intl. Organization

Third Party:Research Institute,

Associations…

Provincial Government

County Government

Governance Challenges• Information distortion

– Family reduce nutrition care level

• Corruption– Fake names– Delayed distribution

• Implementation puzzles– Subsidy defalcation– Food safety– Loss of efficiency– Focused only on

“demonstrate” regions

• How to supervise the project became essential– Private efforts can cover

small-scale projects– Public supervision had

been hard and costly

Case 2: Nutrition Program organized via SMT

• “Free Lunch” Project• Started by Deng Fei, reporter, joint by 500 other reporters,

more than 10 major medias• Goals of the project

– First nutrition project to school age students– 3 yuan for a free lunch to every elementary student– Total transparent charity

• Fast Spread by SMT– Launched on March 9th , 2011– Personal, official Weibo account (Chinese twitter) with 100,050

followers– B2C donation platform with 250,000 yuan donation on the first day

Social Media Technology

• Chinese internet users: 0.497 billion• Mobil Internet users: 0.397 billion• Weibo (Chinese Twitter) user: 0.331billion• Social network user: 0.288 billion

Source: CNNIC 2013: China Internet Development Report

Social Media Distribution

First Elementary School with “Free Lunch”

April, 2nd, 2011

Donation on B2C online store

Before the Project

• Sha Ba Elementary School, Qian Xi County, Guizhou Province.

• 169 students, among which 40 students lived closer to school, while 120 students lived very far.

• Few could took lunch to school while others simply skip their lunch.

• Afternoon session from 12:30 to 3:00pm

Regions with Free Lunch Schools

Source: Free lunch official website

SMT’s role in Free Lunch Program

• Social supervision mechanism solved problems with information distortion and prevented corruption. Implementation puzzles were reduced as well

• Systematic supervision + volunteer supervision– Systematic supervision:

• Strict application process• Daily report + Monthly report + Annual audit

– Volunteer supervision:• Volunteer charity became one of the charity format

• Random check by volunteers, including: budget, sanitary condition of the school dinning hall, lunch menu, food safety …

• Connected with multiple local volunteer organizations to check the qualification of the school and families

• Follow up check with students, parents for the quality of the free lunch

• ……

– Adopting SMT in the program, governance structure was reduced into two layers, which greatly reduced implementation puzzles.

Governance Structure

Donations or Central Budget

Free Lunch Program within The China Charity Foundation

Qualified Elementary Schools

Volunteers, government

Volunteer supervision

Spill-over Effect

• Till March, 2014, the project reached*:– Donation of 92 million yuan

– 347 elementary schools

– Benefited more than 83,000 students

– The average cost is among the lowest, with 1108 yuan per student

• “Student Nutrition Improvement Plan” by MOE in 2011 fall– Till October 2013, 699 experiment county in 22 provinces had school dinning

halls being built. Nearly 22.4 million students had their free lunch under the

project. Central government allocated 52 billion yuan for lunch subsidy, and

30 billion for dinning hall construction (average cost 3660 yuan per student ).

– Different from top-down subsidy, part of the subsidies were executed

through “Free lunch project” by subsidizing 1/3 of the lunch cost

– Some schools borrow the operational mechanism of “free lunch project”Source: Monthly report of May 2014, http://www.mianfeiwucan.org/fileadmin/docs/yuebao/免费午餐月报 __总第20期 _2014年 5月刊 .pdf

SMT’s Contribution to Chinese Public Affairs

• Generating bottom-up mechanism for public policy making process in China, which makes up the current political system for the representativeness.

• SMT’s technological feature makes it suitable with issues relevant to people’s daily life. – It helps to find public goods scarcity with quick speed (i.e. local light

pole check).

– Interactive feature speed up problem solving process (i.e. traffic information dissemination)

– Convenience of the technology makes massive supervision possible (i.e. find losing kids)

• Accumulated social media actions are powerful enough to raise up governmental attentions and actions

Conclusion and Discussion

• SMT could flat governance structure to enhance supervision and participation in Children nutrition projects

• The bottom-up SMT can lead to government top-down regulations to enlarge the project scale

• SMT provides a good example for relevant social problem solving by– Find social problems that need greatly attention– Suggesting a new organizational format– Increase involvement and participation to increase

representativeness

THANKS. COMMENTS ARE WELCOME

YIXIN DAI

YIXINDAI@TSINGHUA.EDU.CN

Governance Structure with SMT embedded

Monthly Report

Offi

cial Website

Annual Audition

Application*

Application requirement: 1. Annual income < 2300 yuan;2. More than half of the students can’t afford lunch; or spend more

than one hour one-way to school

Free Lunch Budget

Contact Phone No.Student Names

Volunteer Supervisor

School Weibo Accounts

Daily Report:- Income

- Outspend- Revenue

- Lunch counts

Track each donation

School Dinning Hall

Project Weibo Account Volunteer Weibo AccountsSchool Investigation