‘Women don’t know what to feed their children’

Dr Chris Osa Isokpunwu is the head of nutrition in the Federal Ministry of Health. In this interview he says most women are ignorant of what to feed their children and laments that the inability of women to exclusively breast feed their babies has increased the rate of malnutrition among children. What does the department […]

Dr Chris Osa Isokpunwu is the head of nutrition in the Federal Ministry of Health. In this interview he says most women are ignorant of what to feed their children and laments that the inability of women to exclusively breast feed their babies has increased the rate of malnutrition among children.
What does the department of nutrition do?
The nutrition responsibility of the federal government, especially the Ministry of Health, covers all Nigerians and of course cuts across life. But the general focus is on women and children. We focus on infant and young child feeding, micronutrient deficiency control and building evidence base to strengthen nutrition information system and appropriate policies.
The National Food and Nutrition Policy has been reviewed. It was a 15-year-old policy and awaiting approval. We have at FMOH the costed plan for nutrition, encompassing what the health sector needs to do to change the nutrition of Nigeria. It has six objectives, six targets, six strategies in six priority areas. We focus on infant and young child feeding, micronutrient deficiency control and the community management of acute malnutrition and research.
Have the strategies made the desired impact?
The strategies have just been approved and implementation has just started. It is hoped that it is going to make an impact. It should last from now till 2019 and we want to see that exclusive breastfeeding rate increases to 50% at least; there is no increase in child obesity, we want to reduce wasting to less than 10%, reduce stunting by 40% and anaemia in pregnancy also reduced by some percentage.
If we are to fully implement everything across the country, the plan will cost $900 billion over five years. We have other plans so that we can prioritise and focus on states that are worst hit so we can reduce the cost.
How does the federal government assist states with high rate of malnourished children?
We need to define the roles of each tier of government. The federal government’s role is to set policy and guidelines and monitor implementation. To that extent, we have already started setting the guidelines. Beyond that, we mobilise and advocate for increased funding. We need to make a case for nutrition as an investment priority, not just a humanitarian programme.
What is your take on the few centres that provide treatment for malnourished children?
When you visit such centres you are moved to take action. There is no person with blood running within his veins that will not be moved to contribute his quota to help these children. Some of our political leaders though, don’t believe there is malnutrition in Nigeria, and even when you put up such pictures tomorrow, somebody is going to tell you it is not from his country, that you just downloaded it from the internet.  We have over 30 sites around this environ.
Is denial one of the issues fueling the increasing number of malnourished children?
I think it is. There is a tendency to politicise everything but it doesn’t change the facts. We are making progress in the Community Management of Acute Malnutrition (CMAM) programme. About a million of such children have been treated in the past four years and we are looking at scaling that up, because the number of children that are malnourished at that level is high. We are looking at 10% of 32 million, that’s 3.2 million children in that situation.
The CMAM is in the 11 northern states. Though we do have a lot of such cases in southern Nigeria and we need to scale up to cover the regions.
CMAM is a way of involving the community.
Beyond the treatment, how do you take the message to communities?
We have integrated infant and young child feeding into the CMAM  programmes and that involves promoting exclusive breastfeeding. We advocate for women to breastfeed their babies for up to one year, and later they can introduce adequate complementary feeding, through education and nutrition information.
We also have community volunteers who teach the children. There are children who are malnourished but not qualified to be admitted into the programme. The mothers are then given nutrition information education in order to improve the nutritional status of their children.