Nigeria Records 2.5m Severe Malnourished Children Annually – FG
By: Ahmed Aminu, Dutse
No fever than 2.5 million children suffer from severe malnutrition annually in Nigeria, an official of the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Mr Samari Godwin Bawa, has said.
Bawa, who is the Nutrition Commodities and Logistics Management System desk officer in the ministry, made this known in Dutse, on Tuesday.
He spoke to The Syndicate on the sidelines of a two day training for Nutrition Programme Officers on Nutrition commodities logistics on-boarding into the Nigerian health management information systems (NHLMIS).
Bawa explained that the federal government was worried about the number of severely malnourished children the country, and decided to on-board nutrition programme into the Nigerian health logistics management system.
“Nigeria is the second to India with the worst cases in the world and the cases are increasing despite laudable efforts by the Nigerian government, partners and donor agencies on nutrition programmes”.
“To that regard, nutrition programme need to be on-boarded into Nigerian health logistics management system,” he added.
According to him, the federal ministry of health is collaborating with Jigawa state government, supported by Nutrition International joint efforts, to address the challenges of Nutrition commodities stock out in Jigawa state health facilities.
“We are onboarding Nutrition so that federal, states and local governments can have a visibility to commodities just like other public health programmes that are already onboarded,” Bawa said.
The desk officer maintained that the training will build capacity of logistics managers dealing with nutrition commodities, on proper utilisation of the Nigerian health logistics management system platform in terms of accountability of nutrition commodities in the state.
In her remarks, the Nutrition International Senior Programme Officer, Mrs Ayodele Gbemileke, commended federal and state governments for the effort to ensure accountability and reduce nutrition commodities stock out.
Mrs Gbemileke said, Nutrition International supports federal ministry of health and social welfare to train about 40 nutrition logistics managers in Jigawa on the use of platform.
She urged the participants to utilize the skills acquired during the training and step it down to other Nutrition officers to achieve the desired goals of savings million of children in the country from the risk of being stunted.
The Jigawa state nutrition officer, Malam Muhammad Abdullahi, said the state government in partnership with the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), has procured N500 million worth of Ready to Use Therafic Food (RUTF), which was supplied to all malnutrition treatment centers in the state.
