By George Fominyen | Wed., July 27, 3:37 PM | Comments ( 0 )
This March 2007 photo shows women beating stems of millet in Salewa village, about 400 km (249 miles) from the capital Niamey, one of the country's most vulnerable regions in terms of food insecurity. REUTERS/Samuel de Jaegere
By George Fominyen
As the world’s attention turns to East Africa’s hunger crisis, with famine in parts of Somalia being declared, a statement from Niger warning on alarming child malnutrition rates in the West African country seems to have gone unnoticed by the international media.
This year in Niger, 200,000 children aged between six and 59 months will need treatment for severe acute malnutrition, which usually increases the risk of death in children below five years of age, while half a million other children are expected to be treated for moderate acute malnutrition, Niger’s authorities have said.
“Each week, thousands of sick children flood the existing health centres available throughout the country which is proof that underlying causes of malnutrition in Niger should be seriously dealt with,” said Maimouna Guero, the director for nutrition in the Niger ministry of health.
Niger, located in West Africa’s arid Sahel region that runs south of the Sahara desert, has a history of food shortages and nutrition crises.
A major international intervention was required last year when half of the country’s 15 million inhabitants experienced huge food shortages and severe nutritional problems after poor rainfall led to bad harvests in 2009.
Late last year there was a better harvest, and malnutrition rates have dropped from the levels seen during the period of the food shortages, but rates remain above international emergency thresholds.
“Whether harvests are good or not 2.1 million of people are food insecure in some Niger regions,” Eric Alain Ategbo, nutrition manager for the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Niger, told AlertNet.
“The head of the family can barely feed his family with the yields of his plantation for more than four to six months in a year,” he said.
“When he turns to the local market after the sale of his last crops prices of basic food commodities are soaring and his purchasing power is so insignificant that he cannot afford to buy food nutritious enough for his children to grow to their full potential.”
Experts say now is the time for the international community to help Niger. How? By encouraging Niger’s government to make nutrition a priority in annual budgetary allocations, and by giving its people financial support instead of waiting for drought, or other climatic shocks, to cause food and nutrition emergencies.
“Funds are needed to improve the health system’s surge capacity to identify and treat an important caseload of acute malnourished children,” Ategbo said. “We also need to ensure that the health personnel have the required skills in terms of planning, coordinating and managing malnutrition cases throughout the year, and during emergencies.”
He said extra resources would also enable government services and aid groups to promote programmes to ensure communities adopt cheap, free and effective nutrition practices, such as exclusive breastfeeding within the hour of a child’s birth and up to six months.
Only 27 percent of Niger’s mothers exclusively breastfeed their children up to six months according to a child survival survey conducted last year.
Essentially, it all boils down to that clichéd expression – prevention is better than a cure. If the world and Niger’s authorities start acting now on malnutrition they may be better placed to handle future climatic shocks.
For a Q+A with UNICEF's Ategbo, see here.
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