Report from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reveals that over 2.7 million children under the age of five in Nigeria suffer from severe acute malnutrition called wasting annually.
The report also indicated that only two out of 10 of these children have access to the needed treatment including the Ready -To -Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF).
RUTF is an energy-densed, mineral and vitamin enriched food that requires no preparation and specifically designed to treat Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM)
To this end, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has warned that if nothing is done to address wasting, 400,000 of these children which represents 20% will die.
Speaking at a Nutrition Stakeholders’ Consultation Workshop on Wasting Management on Thursday in Abuja, USAID’s Nutrition Specialist, Ebenezer Oluloto noted that the direct and indirect causes of death for
most children under the age of five are linked to malnutrition especially wasting.
According to him, the causes of wasting in Nigeria range from childhood illness and inadequate diet to poor access to food, care, as well as maternal and child health nutrition services.
Oluloto who emphasized that a child’s nutritional status is linked to the nutritional status of the mother before, during and after pregnancy stressed the need for improvement on maternal nutrition to reduce wasting and incidence of low birth weight.
“Malnutrition has far reaching impact on the most vulnerable populations most especially women, adolescent age group, and children within the first 1000 days.
“The intervention has to start from the day the child is conceived till the second birthday of the child”, he said.
The USAID Nutrition Specialist also expressed concerns on the challenges RUTF local producers face in importing raw materials.
He further assured of USAID’s commitment to assist government in combating malnutrition in the country.
He said “Addressing Malnutrition is critical to improving health, education and economic development.
“We look forward to improved networking and actionable key next steps (Immediate, mid-term and long term) to address wasting and scale up sustainable investment to prevent, detect, treat child wasting as well as follow up treated cases. This is in line with global action country population roadmap to reduce wasting incidence to less than 5% by 2025 and 3% by 2030”.
Also speaking, representative from the Federal Ministry of Health and Acting Head of Nutrition, Mr John Uruakpa said although a lot have been achieved in the improvement of Nutrition, a lot more need to be done.
He said “We need to do something different at least if we can’t eradicate it, we can come down to 1%”.
It is expected that at the end of the workshop a workable document will be developed to assist in improving nutrition for a healthy, productive and resilient Nigeria.
Participants believe that findings from the workshop will serve as a guide to the government of Nigeria as well as other implementing partners in establishing a specific and contextualize strategy that is workable in Nigeria to produce better result.
