The Lagos State Government, in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, has trained no fewer than 60 frontline health workers on maternal, infant, and young child nutrition to reduce the burden of malnutrition in the state and the country in general.
The state government expressed optimism that the training of the health workers with support from the World Bank through its Accelerating Nutrition Results in Nigeria Project, would check high infant deaths linked to malnutrition in the country.
Nigeria is ranked number one in Africa and second in the world in terms of malnourished children, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund.
UNICEF also stated that 12 million out of the 35 million under-five children in Nigeria are stunted due to malnutrition.
Left untreated, experts say children with severe acute malnutrition are nearly 12 times more likely to die than a healthy child.
Speaking at the ongoing training of the health workers in Lagos, the Director and Head of the Nutrition Department, Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Ladidi Bako-Aiyegbusi, said the nutrition workshop was more of a preventive approach and not treatment.
The workshop was organised by the Federal Government under the Federal Ministry of Health, Nutrition Department and supported by the World Bank ANRIN project.
Bako-Aiyegbusi, who was represented by a senior medical officer of the ministry, Maria Odey, identified malnutrition as a major contributor to an alarming number of infant mortality in the country.
Odey said, “This training is specifically for nutrition. It is complementary to some treatment courses like the integrated management of childhood illnesses and the integrated management of acute malnutrition.
“It talks more about nutrition because we know that malnutrition is contributing to over 50 per cent of infant mortality.
“So, it is more of a preventive course training and not treatment. It is to encourage mothers and caregivers to use commonly available rich foods to prepare meals for children and promote breastfeeding. We have 60 health workers for the training.”
The Director of Family Health and Nutrition, Lagos State Ministry of Health, Folashade Oludara, said stunted growth if not reversed by the age of two years could cause irreversible brain damage to the child.
Oludara explained that once the brain of a child was damaged, there was little or nothing anybody could do anymore.
She said, “So we are trying to change this narrative and ensure that none of our children (before they clock the age of two) has malnutrition and do not get stunted to the level that their brain will be irreversibly damaged.
“The objective of the training is to improve Nigeria’s nutritional indices in the state just as we know that right now, there’s food insecurity everywhere and the major group of the community affected are the mothers and children.
“Mothers especially when they are pregnant and children especially when they are under the age of five. So what we are doing today is to intensify the efforts, to improve the efforts of our health workers in providing correct information to the caregivers or pregnant women on the type of nutrition, food or diet that they are supposed to take.”