Amidst food surplus, millions of children still malnourished
body needs to grow properly,” she said.
Agatha, who brought the two girls to Enugu when she heard of the assistance the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was rendering to children affected by malnutrition, said the children eat majorly yam, rice, and ‘akpu’ but could not tell exactly the mode of preparation their mother made.
According to her, the situation is better now compared to when she took them to the hospital about two months ago.
The Head of Nutrition, Federal Ministry of Health, Dr Chris Isokpunwu, presenting a paper titled, ‘Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria: What Will it Cost?’ at the workshop, revealed that the Nigerian government would need $912 million over a period of five years to implement its National Nutrition Intervention Plan (NNIP) to check the menace of malnutrition resulting in high rate of infant and mother mortality across the country.
He added that if the plan is implemented, it would save about 890,000 stunting cases and 123,000 lives within five years.
Dr Isokpunwu said though nearly one million children under the age of five died in Nigeria yearly die to malnutrition related cases, most of other deaths were not reported.
“You only hear that a child died of malaria, diarrhoea, cholera and other diseases,” he said, noting that the sure way of tackling the issue of malnutrition was through immunisation but that it was useless when the child has already become malnourished; so prevention is better then cure,” he said.
The nutritionist noted that there should be behavioural change intervention, micronutrient and de-worming intervention, complimentary and therapeutic feeding intervention as a deliberate focus on children under five and the first 1000 days once the woman gets pregnant.
These, Isokpunwu added, will go a long way in curbing the increasing cases of malnutrition and also scaling up the campaign for the use of ORS and zinc oxide in treatment.
He lamented that unfortunately, malnutrition was sometimes fuelled by the society, household and individual influences based on diverse opinions about how a child should be fed.
A Nutrition Specialist with UNICEF, Ngozi Onuorah, said inadequate government commitment and funding for nutrition programme has been one of the reasons for the increase in malnutrition cases in the country.
She said funding for nutrition must be increased and released for nutritional intervention for children which, according to her, has not yet been done.
Other challenges she numerated include, “inadequate government commitment, poorly motivated workforce, poor salary structure and non-payment of salaries in some states, poor attitude of health workers, poorly coordinated health interventions in states by staff who see nutrition programmes as supplementary immunisation activity and so do not pay attention to the major drives.”
Dr Ken Ozoemena, a social policy specialist working with UNICEF, reeling out some statistics during his presentation on, ‘Child Friendly Budgeting; Addressing Child Malnutrition’, noted that over 11 million U5s Nigerian children are stunted, ranking Nigeria 2nd only to India.
He said also that Nigeria accounts for one-tenth of the global burden of Severe Acute under-five Malnutrition (SAM) with 37% of U5 Nigerian children stunted, 29% underweight, and 18% wasted.
According to him, 2,300 U5 Nigerian children die every day more than a half of these deaths are related to malnutrition causes while presently the country is battling to treat 2.5 million under-five children severely malnourished.
His words: “About 30% of Nigerian children are underweight (don’t weigh enough for their age), more than double the proportion of underweight Ghanaian children.”
However, there is hope if the country is to save its future leaders.
N2.3 billion is required per round to implement the minimum package of nutrition intervention said a UNICEF nutritionist.
He added that though UNICEF and its partners are supporting the programme, an average of N68 million is needed per state for each round.
“What are we waiting for already, to save our future presidents and leaders from ruins of malnutrition,” Ozoemena said.