Up to 300,000 children in Nigeria could die of malnutrition this year without intervention to save them, the United Nations Children’s Fund has said, even as stakeholders complain the government has done nothing to fund or implement its nutrition policy, two years after it was passed.
Estimates suggest up to 1.6 million children are at risk, many of them from moderate malnutrition, which will progress to severe malnutrition without any intervention, according to Arjan de Waqt, Chief of Nutrition at UNICEF, who addressed a town hall meeting on nutrition in Abuja on Friday.
“We have become deaf to these numbers. We have accepted these numbers. We don’t find it strange, unless it is your child, then it is no more a number,” de Wagt said.
“At least 280,000 of them don’t have to die if you give them ready-to-use-therapeutic food, and you need government support for that,” he noted. The Civil Society Scaling up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN), a coalition of non-government groups working on nutrition, lamented that government’s own National Strategic Plan of Action on Nutrition (NSPAN) has not seen any funding or implementation.
“How can a policy be developed for 2014 to 2019 - it is 2016 and there’s no funding for it?” questioned Dr Philippa Momah, of CS-SUNN.
The coalition said it was “disheartening” that the 2016 federal and state budgets had been finalised and “yet nutrition was not seen as a priority issue in a country where over 11 million under five children are stunted.”
A tense meeting of civil society groups early in the week drew up a communiqué it presented to the Senate committee on health, requesting the legislature to prevail on the executive to ensure major health issues-routine immunisation, family planning, childhood killer diseases and nutrition-get top priority in government agenda, said Dr Ngozi Onuorah, project coordinator for CS-SUNN.
By: Judd-Leonard Okafor
Daily Trust News
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